Steve Roach
Location: (El Paso, TX)
Personal Research Web Page: http://www.cs.utep.edu/sroach/
Keywords: runtime monitoring, deductive synthesis, automated software engineering, automated testing, scientific computation
Posted on: Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Broad Research Area: Programming Languages / Compilers, Scientific/Medical Informatics, Software Engineering
Research Interests:
The most pressing and urgent problem in software development is the creation of software on which we can rely to perform as intended. Given how ubiquitous software is in every field of human endeavor, this is one of the most important problems facing mankind. My research focuses on the development of software systems for distributed and high assurance applications. Part of this work relates to the formal specification of software properties. Formal specifications can be used by a variety of software tools for creating and verifying software. These tools include model checkers, theorem provers, runtime monitors, and program synthesis systems. Formal specifications can be used to identify conflicting requirements, manage change in requirements (pre- and post-deployment), and detect errors during software execution.
I am engaged in the application of software engineering technology to real world problems, namely the development of application software for use by scientists and engineers. The goals of the development of this set of applications are two-fold: first, it is my intent to provide software support to important research, research that might not be possible without the availability of reliable, trustworthy software. As such, much of the work is multidisciplinary. Second, the development of production software provides numerous examples against which to test the cost-effectiveness of industrial software engineering approaches. Ideas on improving the reliability and reducing the cost of software abound; however, few are used in practice, in part because their efficacy remains undemonstrated. By applying techniques and practices to real-world software projects, we are testing the applicability and cost-effectiveness of these techniques and training a cohort of software engineers who can make reasoned decisions about these techniques in industrial practice.
Most prominent of this work is the development of the software currently in use by the space scientists in the analysis of data from the NASA Cassini mission to Saturn. Software developed for this mission aids in mission planning and rapid opportunity analysis as well as image analysis from the ISS, CIRS, and VIMS instruments on Cassini. The research group has investigated and developed a number of software refactorings that are used to migrate procedural IDL code to object-oriented IDL code.
Other applications under development include the PROSPEC property specification tool, which guides domain experts in the development of formal specifications for use by formal software analysis tools. Aligned with this is the development of a framework for model-checker based testing of formal specifications and the development of mechanisms for the generation of specifications in LTL. The PROSPEC work includes porting the software to the Eclipse platform and providing visual feedback for validation of the resulting specifications.
In the fall of 2008, I began working with Craig Tweedie of the Systems Ecology Laboratory in the Department of Biology at UTEP. This work will result in a system that allows climate researchers to access data from a network of sensors. A novel part of this system is the automated data quality flagging that identifies anomalous data on upload
Contact Information:
email obfuscated - click to reveal
915- 747- 5727
Dr. Steve Roach
Department of Computer Science
The University of Texas at El Paso
El Paso, TX 79968
