The Future of Software: Adaptation and Dependability

Presenter:Professor Paola Inverardi
Date: Monday, October 6, 2008
Time: 12.30pm - 1:30pm
Venue:EN101, Engineering Building. Swinburne University, Hawthorn

ABSTRACT
Software in the near ubiquitous future (Softure) will need to cope with variability, as software systems get deployed on an increasingly large diversity of computing platforms and operate in different execution environments. Heterogeneity of the underlying communication and computing infrastructure, mobility inducing changes to the execution environments and therefore changes to the availability of resources and continuously evolving requirements require software systems to be adaptable according to the context changes. Softure should also be reliable and meet the user's performance requirements and needs. Moreover, due to its pervasiveness, Softure must be dependable, which is made more complex given the highly dynamic nature of service provision. Supporting the development and execution of Softure systems raises numerous challenges that involve languages, methods and tools for the systems' thorough design and validation in order to ensure dependability of the self-adaptive systems that are targeted.
However these challenges, taken in isolation are not new in the software domain. In this talk I will discuss some of these challenges making reference to the approach undertaken in the IST PLASTIC project (www.ist-plastic.org) for a specific instance of Softure focused on software services for Beyond 3G (B3G) networks. I will try to highlight what I consider innovative and futurist for software and what I simply consider software for the future.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Paola Inverardi is full professor in Computer Science at University of L'Aquila, Italy, since 1994. Previously she worked at IEI-CNR in Pisa (1984-1994) and at Olivetti Research Lab. in Pisa, Italy, (1981-1984).  She was coordinator of the Laurea Program in Computer Science from 1994 to 2000. From 2001 to 2007 she was Head of the Department of Computer Science at University of L'Aquila, where she leads the Software Engineering and Architecture Research Group. From November 2008 till November 2012 she will be Dean of the Faculty of Science at University of L’Aquila.
Her main research area is in the application of formal methods to software development. Her research interest primarily concentrates in the field of software architectures. She has worked on the verification and analysis of software architecture properties, both behavioural and quantitative for component-based, distributed and mobile systems. She has served as general chair, program chair and program committee member for many international conferences. She is program co-chair of the ETAPS conference of FASE 2008. She is general chair of Automated Software Engineering Conference (ASE 2008) held in L’Aquila in September 2008 and she is program co-chair of the forthcoming International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2009) that will be held in Vancouver in May 2009. She was member and chair of the Workshop on Software Performance (WOSP) Steering Committee from 2002 to 2006. She has been member since 2001 and chair since 2003 of the ESEC (European Software Engineering Conference) Steering Committee. She is member of the ICSE Steering Committee. Since July 2005 she has been member at large of the ACM SIFSOFT (ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering) Executive Committee (http://www.sigsoft.org/about/execComm.htm). She had been associate editor of the ACM TOSEM Journal (http://www.acm.org/pubs/tosem/) till December 2007.