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Community Newsletter of the Masters of Software Engineering Professional Programs at Carnegie Mellon University Spring 2019 Edition

High Stakes As the opioid crisis in America continues to claim thousands of lives every year, an MSIT-ESE team and their wearable device aims to fight back.

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F ROM T H E DI R E C T OR

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HIG H S T A KE S

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Program Director, Tony Lattanze, gives a brief overview of program updates

How an MSIT-ESE team and their wearable device is tackling the opioid crisis in America – and taking home top national honors while they do so!

GOI NG D OWN TH E P IP ES

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STUD ENT PR OJ EC T S

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HONOR S

AG EN T O F C H A N G E

A 2003 graduate of the MSE program, Christian Jungers spoke with us about starting his own company, spinning off a startup, and how a principled approach to software development has enabled him to get results.

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From inventory management systems to robotic knitting to code plagiarism detection, MSE and MSIT students are taking on some of the toughest and most interesting real-world problems out there.

Our students, faculty, and staff continue to impress.

Learn more about the recipients of various awards, honors, and commendations.

LIF E T I M E O F “ I T DE PEND S”

Mel Rosso-Llopart has been with the program for almost two decades. As he prepares for his next great adventure, we took a moment to sit down with him to discuss his path, what he’s learned as a teacher, and the mark that MSE made upon him.

MSE Team Mario worked alongside clients from Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy to build the back end infrastructure for the robotic decommissioning of nuclear facilities across the country.

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FAC/STAFF NEWS

Last year was a very good year for some of our faculty and staff members. Catch up with some of our faculty and staff on what is new in their research and work.

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TO P G U N T O T O P T EACHER

As Dave Root strikes out to seek his next challege, we sat down with the beloved teacher to hear his story, learn about what’s next, and talk about how he’s grown as an instructor.

The MSE Programs are proud to be a part of:

STATEMENT OF ASSURANCE Carnegie Mellon University does not discriminate in admission, employment, or administration of its programs or activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, handicap or disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, ancestry, belief, veteran status, or genetic information. Furthermore, Carnegie Mellon University does not discriminate and is required not to discriminate in violation of federal, state, or local laws or executive orders.

Inquiries concerning the application of and compliance with this statement should be directed to the university ombudsman, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, telephone 412-268-1018.

Obtain general information about Carnegie Mellon University by calling 412-268-2000.

FROM THE DIRECTOR Dear alumni and friends of the program, Greetings from Pittsburgh! I hope that this newsletter finds you healthy, happy, and prosperous in every way. As a new year begins, we like to pause and reflect upon all that we have achieved and the major milestones we have passed over the previous year. This has been a remarkable year of achievement, change, and evolution.

This year we welcomed 85 students to our various programs – one of our largest classes in the history of software engineering programs. It was a lively and productive group to say the least. This year two of our project teams made headlines with their work.

One of our 2018 MSE teams worked with the Robotics Institute and the Portsmouth Plutonium Enrichment site in Portsmouth, Ohio on a project named RadPiper. The facility has been decommission as an enrichment plant and is an Environmental Protection Agency superfund cleanup site. A key impediment to decommissioning the facility is ensuring that the infusion pipes inside the buildings do not have unacceptably high levels of radiation in them. Technicians had to measure the radiation in these pipes by hand from within radiation suits, a tedious and dangerous process. CMU’s Robotics Institute created a robot able to crawl through the enrichment pipes and collect data. The MSE RadPiper team designed and built an automated system to analyze the data collected by the robot and determine where (if any) radiation hotspots were in the pipes. The hope is that this system will save many thousands of person effort hours and reduce the risks associated with the inspection process at the facility.

Another of our 2018 MSIT-ESE teams worked to help mitigate the risks associated with overdose in opioid addicts. According to the CDC, there were in excess of 70,000 opioid drug overdoses in the United States in 2017. Over half of those individuals did not survive. Working with a medical startup, Pinney Associates, an MSIT-ESE team built a prototype wearable device that monitors human blood-oxygen content. The device is worn by opioid addicts and identifies when they are in the process of overdosing.

The system then notifies friends, first responders, and others who can intervene. Though still a prototype, production systems such as these have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives. I invite you to read more about all of our exciting student projects in this alumni issue.

Program alumni are fully aware of the program’s academic rigors and the inherent challenges of doing an applied project.

Having this depth of impact, however, takes the “Agents of Change” label to another level entirely. Through their dedication and accomplishments, these student teams demonstrate beyond any doubt that their ‘heart is in the work’.

It’s always sad when one of the MSE family moves on to begin a new life chapter. And so it was for MSE in 2018-19. Linda Smith, the program’s administrator for over 18 years, retired in May 2018. Linda started at CMU in October 2000, holding key administrative roles in Distance Education, the Embedded Software Engineering program, and the Master of Information Technology Strategy programs. She never failed to place our students front and center in her daily activities.

Program faculty since 2000, Mel Rosso-Llopart’s impact throughout the last 18 years has been enormous and profound. Mel served in a variety of roles in MSE, with INI, and in undergraduate software engineering. Ever the consummate mentor, software engineer, and instructor, Mel has moved on to take a position with the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh.

David Root, our own Naval commander, top-gun graduate, and program faculty since 2002, retired from teaching and assumed a position with the Software Engineering Institute in San Antonio, Texas. During his time with MSE, Dave taught, mentored, advised, served as point man on the Master of Information Technology Strategy degree program, coordinated Studio, mentor

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Program Director, Tony Lattanze gives a small token of appreciation to program alumnus, Christian Jungers, after his Agent of Change Lecture Series talk. To learn more about Christian’s journey from starting his own company to leading a cutting edge spin-off in the energy domain, check out his feature on page 7.

assignments, and the mentor-training program, and was the program’s “Swiss army knife”. When I spoke with him recently, he was “still digging life.”

Vaishali Gakhar joined the MSE family in April 2016. Since that time, she has contributed mightily as the Manager of Alumni and Corporate Relations. Her efforts have enabled the program to better identify industry collaborators, and to source projects like those mentioned above. Vaishali will be taking a staff position at the Tepper School of Business.

Change always leaves us a bit twitchy about the future, but change is the only constant. I personally want to thank all of these individuals for their contributions in advancing our programs. They will be sorely missed and I wish them all well on this next chapter of their lives.

I am excited to report that a few new faces have joined our team. Sujata Telang is the newest member of the MSE teaching track faculty and a 2000 program alum. She worked at CMU Silicon Valley and here in Pittsburgh with iCarnegie and the eBusiness graduate program. Sujata has deep experience in the learn-by-doing approach, project-based courses, and a passion for mentoring student teams. We welcome her back into the MSE family as a faculty member, and look forward to her leadership in managing the project courses, coordinating mentoring, and supervising mentor training.

Marlana Pawlak joined the MSE family in May 2018 as its newest program administrator. Marlana is assuming many of the responsibilities once handled by Linda, and then some. A 2014 graduate from Allegheny College, Marlana has been working in higher education for two years in addition to teaching English in Thailand for one year before joining the MSE family.

She’s a refreshing, energetic, and insightful new member of our team.

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Seattle alumni from across the years gathered together with MSE faculty and staff this past summer at Cursed Oak Bar in Belltown. Regional alumni gatherings are a crucial component to keeping our alumni connected and engage. The program currently hosts two regular regional events each year in San Francisco and Seattle.

We continue our efforts to reach out to program alumni and industry through annual regional events. These visits keep us grounded and enable us to remember what is important – you. Mel Rosso-Llopart and Vaishali Gakhar spearheaded this past year’s outreach event in Seattle where they met with several industry representatives and gathered with some 25 alumni at the Cursed Oak Bar & Restaurant. She and Matt Bass also visited several companies and alumni in San Francisco.

Reunion events in San Francisco are generally very well attended, with nearly 35 alumni gathering at Paul Martin’s American grill to trade memories and war stories. What a wonderful opportunity to reconnect, meet alumni and their growing families, and hear all about their latest career adventures, trials, and tribulations. Please keep a lookout for upcoming events. If you would like us to swing by your city, do let us know.

We remain committed to fostering strong relationships with alumni and industry partners, to ensuring that the curriculum is grounded in enduring principles yet responsive to the changing needs and demands of industry, and to advancing educational opportunities, outreach, and impact. Meeting with alumni, industry representatives, and engineers and managers in the places where alumni work afford us a deeper understanding. We invite you to share your feedback.

On behalf of the program’s faculty, staff, and directorship, I wish you and yours a rewarding, healthy, and prosperous 2019.

Anthony J. Lattanze Director, Master of Software Engineering Professional Programs

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(Photo credit: Beachbody)

High Stakes

How an MSIT-ESE team and their wearable device is tackling the opioid crisis in America – and taking home top national honors while they do so!

There is an epidemic. It is prevalent in cities and communities both large and small. And this epidemic is killing thousands every single year: opioid drugs.

Heroin, oxycodone, and fentanyl are among a class of drugs known as opioids. And their widespread abuse is leading to unprecedented rates of overdose death in the United States. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, opioid overdose accounted for over 42,000 deaths in the US from 2016-17.

Alongside their client, the pharmaceutical consulting firm Pinney Associates, a group of MSIT-ESE students took on the challenge of developing a technology solution to address the skyrocketing number of overdose deaths each year.

The four members of Team Hashtag, as they dubbed themselves, partnered with their project sponsor Pinney Associates in the fall of 2017 after watching a presentation

by Pinney’s Steve Pype and the CEO of Pinney spin-off Harm Reduction Therapeutics, Dr. Michael Hufford.

Pinney Associates is a consulting leader in prescriptionto-over-the-counter (Rx-to-OTC) switch, the support of marketed consumer healthcare products, pharmaceutical risk management, abuse potential assessment, and abuse-deterrent drug products. Their team is responsible for the Rx-to-OTC switch of nicotine therapy replacement products, such as Nicorette, in the mid-1990’s.

Just this past year, a non-profit pharmaceutical company, Harm Reduction Therapeutics, spun out of Pinney Associates with the goal of making naloxone, a life-saving opioid antagonist which can reverse overdose, widely available over-the-counter at a low cost.

But while making naloxone widely available is a good first step in combating overdose, there is a catch. “Having

Team Hashtag developed a wearable device which relies on pulse oximetry to detect opiod overdose

naloxone on hand doesn’t matter if you overdose and there is nobody nearby to administer it,” Harm Reduction Therapeutics’ CEO Michael Hufford notes. “Having a cheap but reliable device that can detect overdose could be absolutely central in saving lives. But that is an immense technical challenge. And so we looked to Carnegie Mellon and the Masters of Software Engineering programs to help us address this.”

For their part, the members of Team Hashtag found the project concept exciting, but also daunting. “The project was intimidating not only because it was massive, but also because this wasn’t a project where you could simply deliver the code,” explains team member Puneetha Ramachandra. “There was a burden of real societal responsibility to the project. Lives were on the line. This had to be done properly.”

But developing a solution properly is just what the team did, eventually building a prototype wristband that can detect overdose in the wearer. Using pulse oximetry, the device monitors the amount of oxygen in the user’s blood by measuring light reflected back to a sensor on the skin.

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FEATURE

And while the team is thrilled to have even been a part of the competition, they are equally as excited to see how the device continues to grow and evolve. “There are so many ways this product could be even better,” notes team member Soham Donwalkar. “I can absolutely see additional sensors being incorporated to give a machine learning back end a bigger dataset to work with, reducing the number of false positives, for example. Or, once clinical trials are open, assembling a much larger, more diverse corpus for ML training that encompasses a wide range of physical variables – like age, sex, race, etc. – that could affect what an overdose state looks like!”

Members of Team Hashtag. Back row, left to right: Rashmi Kalkunte Ramesh, YuSam Huang. Front row: Soham Donwalkar, Puneetha Ramachandra

When paired over Bluetooth to a mobile phone, the sensor takes numerous readings on an ongoing basis to establish a baseline reading. Then, if the user’s blood oxygen levels drop for more than approximately one second, it switches an LED on the display from green to red. The device also cues the paired mobile phone – via an app which the team also developed – to send out a message with the user’s GPS coordinates to his or her emergency contacts.

While the approach sounds simple enough, the project was not without its challenges. One of the most significant hurdles was simply understanding what constitutes an overdose. “Even if you asked a group of doctors what defines the overdose, even they would struggle to give you a concrete answer,” team member Rashmi Kalkunte Ramesh notes. “They have to physically assess the person for a variety of signals. It was on us to cull those signals and select a method of reliable, accurate assessment. We eventually honed in on a wrist-mounted pulse oximetry device as the best approach.”

Their solution wasn’t just good enough to impress their clients; it was also clever enough to allow the team to beat out 97% of all submissions to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Opioid Challenge competition, placing them in the finals of the national competition. As a part of the Health 2.0 Conference in September in Santa Clara, the team went head-to-head with some of the most promising, well-funded healthcare entrepreneurs during the final round of competition, ultimately taking home third place and a $10,000 prize.

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At the end of the day, their clients couldn’t be happier. “I wasn’t expecting something that was quite so turnkey,” remarked Pinney’s Steve Pype. “Initially, we were thinking this might be a proof of concept. But here we are: The project is almost finished and they’re still refining the prototype.”

And Harm Reduction Therapeutics’ Hufford agrees. “I’ve started and sold medtech companies where we had labs in garages. You have to have this can-do spirit; you have to find the way forward. And we absolutely got that from this team. Each time we came back to them they exceeded our expectations – they had a solution that worked even better than before; they had a prototype that was even more refined than last time,” Hufford enthusiastically notes “And that’s what a successful start-up feels like. The only way to make it, to generate a lot of return for investors, is to constantly raise the bar. And they did that over and over again. Their passion, humility, dedication, and cleverness is simply so inspiring. Working with CMU and the MSE programs was one of the smartest moves we could have made.”

AGENT OF CHANGE: CHRISTIAN JUNGERS Christian Jungers is the Chief Technical Officer of Fino Consulting, a software consulting firm based in New York City specializing in highly-tailored turn-key software solutions, as well as Therm, a Fino spin-off servicing the energy sector.

A 2003 graduate of the Masters of Software Engineering program, Christian spoke with us recently about his path post-graduation including starting his own company, spinning off a startup, and how a principled approach to software development has enabled him to get results.

Tell us what you did immediately after graduation and leading up to the founding of CM3.

Following graduation, I went to work with an enterprise networking company, Cabletron Systems, that later became Enterasys Networks. I took the position because I wanted to expand my development toolkit and to be able to make good software. The networking company allowed me to get closer to hardware and to better understand embedded development.

I was there for 4 years, right up to the dotcom bust. So, there I was with my severance package trying to figure out my next move when my friend and fellow CMU grad, Scott Ziolko (HSS ’01), called with the proposition: “Have you ever thought about starting your own company?” We spun it up pretty much overnight, and were joined shortly afterwards by another Carnegie Mellon friend, Chris Stratis (HSS ’01, TPR ’05).

That was the beginning of CM3 Consulting which, by the way, stands for Carnegie Mellon 3, a name that was graciously given to us by another group of CMU grads who’d conjured it up for their industrial design company!

Founding your own company is not for the faint of heart. What was it that drove you to take the leap?

Coming out the MSE program, I knew I had this great toolbox. I had new skills and a suitcase of lessons-learned.

I had a stack of white papers rolling around in my head about approaches to specific problems, assessments of those approaches, and suggestions on how one might tackle this or that problem going forward. And, coupled with all that, I now understood process because of my time in the MSE and I possessed the technical skills to fullyexecute.

But in the real world, you don’t have an opportunity to apply these best practices. When you work at big companies, you may not have much control or power.

You’re stuck in someone else’s process or hierarchy.

Opportunities to do the great things that you know you should be doing – that you know would improve the product, the solution, and the company – are either scarce or non-existent. In part, this is why I jumped at the chance to start CM3 – so that I could put my knowledge and best practices to good use.

CM3 and Fino merged in 2013 after you collaborated on a project with Fino’s CEO, Brian Fino. You went on to serve as their CTO and now you are also leading the charge as the CTO of Therm, a Fino spin-off. So, can you tell our readers a bit more about Therm?

Essentially, we are building a cloud-based sales platform tailored for energy retailers. These are the companies that actually provide the electricity or gas that is piped into your home by a utility company.

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Group photo of the Jungers’ MSE cohort on The Cut. Jungers appears in the middle row, far right.

Over the last decade or so, Fino has done a lot of work for energy retailers. And, over that time, we started to realize that this was a market that was ripe for change.

The calculations needed to provide the best prices to consumers for a wide range of offerings across massive geographic markets was not trivial. And the industry was still using some fairly rudimentary tools that were extremely labor intensive and error prone. We knew we could do better.

You can think of Therm as a SaaS solution for these energy retailers, much like Salesforce. Not only can these retailers configure the platform to automate the pricing calculations based on a huge range of variables, they can also track and integrate the solution into their existing sales and servicing infrastructure.

This is a pretty big departure from your work as a boutique consultancy. What sort of challenges did you and your team face with this transition?

The biggest challenge is actually the most exciting part of this entire venture: building expertise. Pretty much every single day for literally the last three years, we have been saying “Oh, now I get it!”.

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We were familiar with the energy space; we’d been working in it for years. But as we started digging deeper into the finer details of the sector, we kept asking questions that were – for lifelong energy sector folks – really fundamental.

But the answers to those questions often revealed some sort of insight that was so simple that it was actually quite revolutionary to insiders – it was a “can’t see the forest for the trees” type scenario.

It comes down to the fact that we are sort of naive experts.

What I mean by that is we have worked with a lot of these companies for years. They know us. They trust us. But we are still outsiders. So we can ask a lot of those really “simple” questions I mentioned. It’s like a get-out-of-jailfree card for getting to the root of the problem these folks needed to solve.

Gaining that expertise has been hard-fought. And, interestingly, I think it is actually the biggest value-add we have in this product. I’m a proponent of domaindriven design. For me, that really means your code, your architecture, your data should mirror reality. And the challenge was: if you go to ten different energy retail companies and you talk to ten different people at each of these companies, you will get 100 different pictures of the industry – different terms, different processes, different ways that they think things happen.

Now, when we get a new client, at some point – and they don’t usually tell us this, but you can feel it – you realize that they’ve woken up to our approach: It’s better. Our models are consistent and universal. Because we asked the right questions, because we were disciplined in our approach to software, we’ve come up with this abstraction of their entire business, end to end. As far as we can tell, that’s never existed for them before. We hope that this is changing the entire way this sector is using software to do business. It’s changing the state of the practice.

Jungers presents to students, faculty, and staff during his Agents of Change lecture in the summer of 2018.

Nobody is on the same page. Because they all have their Excel spreadsheets and they put whatever columns they wanted in there, whatever made sense to them, and then passed it on. And so, just as a whole, the industry is just in a sad state in terms of data integrity, process, and consistency. While it makes what we are trying to do a really big challenge, it also makes it one of the most exciting opportunities of my career.

What is it about that challenge – reconciling so many different siloed perspectives in the field – that you find so exciting?

It is exciting because, at its core, this is a blue sky project.

There are some competitors in this space, but they have been only tackling the problem piecemeal. We are really building a system that unifies the base needs of the industry through abstraction. That’s never been done before, and is only possible if you understand the field holistically.

It’s also exciting because we are actively shaping the state of the practice. One of the reasons I started my own company after leaving CMU was because I wanted to apply the best practices I had learned. I wanted to be that “Agent of Change” that the MSE program trains students to be.

We are several years into our discovery phase of this company and we feel we have a pretty good grasp of what needs to be done. Right now, we are within a few months of having a good model of the entire business around energy retail marketing. There is, of course, a small enough list of things that are still unknown. But, we’ve folded most of the business into our models.

With spinning off a company like Therm – one that is in an opportunity-rich arena, you could say – maintaining a disciplined approach to development would be a challenge in and of itself. How do you manage the trade-offs and set priorities in that sort of wild-west environment?

Actually, a bit of that ability comes back to the Studio capstone project we did in the MSE program.

Studio was all about attempting to do everything right…. and failing miserably. You wanted good architecture. You wanted good modeling. You wanted all the best features completely fleshed out and ready to go by launch. The whole process should be as right as possible. But it isn’t going to be. Invariably, the project is going to come apart somewhere if you try to do everything perfectly and in parallel.

You have to prioritize. A number of years ago, I came across an article by Michael Lopp called “Bits, Features, and Truth”. In it, Lopp put forward that there are three personas at play. The “bits” are the technical folks. The “features” are those advocating for the functionality that users really want. And the “truth” is typically the project management, those concerned about schedules and

One of the reasons I started my

own company after leaving

CMU was because I wanted to

apply the best practices I had learned. I wanted to be that

“Agent of Change” that the MSE

program trains students to be.

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That’s going to be the next big challenge, I think:

How do we bring the rigor we apply to reasoning

about reliability or security or scalability to the actual process of deciding what to design and when?

roadmaps. Lopp points out that you have to have all three, and that they have to be comfortable pushing back against one another. If you don’t, the project will become unbalanced and fail.

If you ask someone to build you a desk and they give you the world’s most perfect drawer, it’s useless. You don’t have a desk. So if there’s only a “bits” person, it’s very easy for engineers to just go down rabbit holes. And then you get the world’s most perfect drawer and no desk to put it in. If there is only the “features” person – it’s like this ramshackle, beautiful-looking thing that as soon as you touch it, it falls apart. Or it just keeps getting delayed to develop one more feature until it never comes out at all. And without truth, you just never get anything done. So you need all these people fighting. That’s how, I’ve found, the priorities get set in the best possible way – through compromise and consensus. We all have a piece of the reality that we are trying to address through this solution, it requires all of our perspectives to figure out how to get there.

Speaking of perspective, through your time working with a lot of different sectors with FINO and now delving into Therm, what do you see as a big issue on the horizon for software engineers? What problem should we all be paying attention to?

I think, for me, what it comes back to is that disciplined approach.

So, as an example, one of the early battles between Brian and I as we were building out Therm was security. From my perspective, let’s start with security and authentication.

Bake it in from day one. Our whole system will have it nicely architected throughout everything.

But Brian pushed back, “Well, when we have one client,

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we just white-list their IPs to have access to the site.” I was floored. It was lunacy from an engineering perspective.

Well, for six months while the initial users went through beta testing of the system, we did not have authentication.

We whitelisted IPs from our client. And it worked. And the time we didn’t spend building authentication allowed us to build features and get to market that much faster. And eventually, folding in proper authentication best practices throughout the application became our highest priority and it got done right to support our first production-ready clients.

We had known, at some point, we would have to come around and fix that. But that was a choice. It was a part of the design. I could push against Brian’s point, but I couldn’t really debate the principle that if we worked on the authentication and didn’t have the functionality the client actually needed, it didn’t matter. It’s not a product.

We don’t have a sale. It was a priority that was set by the “bits, features, and truth” model. We all get in a room and try to find what we feel is the right compromise in terms of features, timelines, etc.

And that phrase “what we feel is the right compromise…” is where I – and probably anyone working in software development at this level – am still working on the discipline side of things: Feeling isn’t rigor. It’s not repeatable. It’s not engineering. It’s entrepreneurial but it’s not engineering.

That’s going to be the next big challenge, I think: How do we bring the rigor we apply to reasoning about reliability or security or scalability to the actual process of deciding what to design and when? At the end of the day, you can read as many case studies as you want and develop your own sense of intuition. But intuition is not measurable.

Invest in the Future of Software Engineering Alumni are the lifeblood of the programs. As alumni, we rely heavily upon your close connections to industry to drive and enrich many facets of our professional programs. Ranging from student recruitment, to teaching distance courses, to sponsoring projects, alumni involvement is vital to the ongoing success of the Software Engineering Professional Programs.

PROJECT SPONSORSHIP Sponsoring an MSE or MSIT project is an immensely rewarding experience, both for alumni of the programs as well as their organizations. Benefits include: • Access to students for recruitment • Developing research relationships with CMU faculty • Undertaking projects that the organization may not have the resources to tackle Please review the options below. If you’d like to further explore sponsorship opportunities, we invite you to contact Jane Miller (jmiller@andrew.cmu.edu), Program Manager.

OPTION 1 • • •

Well-suited to software development projects with larger scope or highly complex requirements and dependencies 4-5 team members Team members average 3-5 years of professional software development experience

•

3 semesters in length. Starts in January and concludes in December

Enernoc // OpenADR Proof-of-Concept Enernoc is a leading provider of software in the energy distribution/demand-response space. Demand response technology supports changes in power consumption by end-users based on fluctuations in the price of electricity. The ability to support a large number of devices and to respond in a timely manner to changing prices or demand were key technical concerns. This project tasked a Masters of Software Engineering team with developing a proof-of-concept solution aimed at achieving these systemic concerns while supporting an emerging automated demand response (OpenADR) standard.

OPTION 2 • • •

Well suited to smaller, fast-paced software development projects. More limited scope than Option 1 2 - 4 team members Team members average 1-2 years of project experience

•

2 semesters in length. Starts in January and concludes in August

The Warhol // Screen Printing Mobile App The Andy Warhol Museum sponsored a team of three MSIT-SE students to develop an iPhone application that digitized Andy Warhol’s silk screen process. The Warhol not only wanted to give people a means to create a Warholesque image, but also wanted to teach people the process that Warhol used to make his famous silk screens. The students were able to successfully deliver an iPhone app that not only achieved these objectives, but also received significant national media attention in The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, and other outlets.

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A Lifetime of “It Depends” Mel Rosso-Llopart has taught courses as a part of the MSE Programs for the last 18 years. Among one of the first graduates of the program, he has sheparded countless students through the degree. But, whether in his own life or in the classroom, Mel has embodied and championed the disciplined, inquisitively analytical approach to software which has been a hallmark of the program.

As he prepares for his next great adventure, we took a moment to sit down with him to discuss his path, what he’s learned as a teacher, and the mark that MSE made upon him.

Alright, Mel, so let’s take it all the way back. How’d you get your start and what was the path to the MSE for you?

And, obviously you did. You came to the MSE program in 1991. And after you graduated, you went back out into industry?

Okay, so before I came to the MSE, I worked for the Department of Defense. I was what they called a Systems Computer Scientist out at Edwards Air Force Base in California. And I had been doing that for about eight years before I came to the program.

So one of the costs of this sponsored graduate school arrangement was that the DoD would send you to school but you had to come back and work for them for a set amount of time. Back then it was a 3:1 ratio; for one year of school, you had to repay them with three years of service.

And so when I graduated of course I went back, which is kind of a super safety net.

Before that, I graduated from the University of California Riverside with degrees in Physics, Biology, and Computer Science. And the Department of Defense (DoD) hired me with my degree in computer science.

I found out, through the grapevine, that the DoD sends employees – usually folks at a certain government service level and about 5-7 years experience – out to get graduate degrees.

So, I began doing research and I looked into a couple of different degree programs. I was accepted at Rice and a couple other schools. But the one that most appealed to me was this brand new program on, specifically, software engineering. And I said, “Gee, this sounds very similar to the types of problems I’m dealing with.”

So I sent an email to James “Jim” Tomayko, who was director at the time, and he immediately responded. And that definitely got my attention. All the other programs would take days to respond, but not Coach. He reached back out right away and we talked about what I’d experience in the last eight years of working with the DoD and he said “You’re exactly who we’re looking for. Apply.”

Around the time that I was wrapping up my commitment to the DoD, I got an opportunity to come back to Pittsburgh. I fell in love with the area when I was here for school; I loved the change of seasons. And in the meantime, I had gotten married and we decided that we wanted to have kids. We wanted to start our family in a place where there were good schools and opportunities. I knew Pittsburgh was like that and so, when I got an offer to join Adtranz (now Bombardier) here in Pittsburgh, we jumped.

I’ll always think back fondly on watching my students grow, both as engineers as well as people.

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FEATURE But many of the other engineers would come to me, “Just tell me what to do.” And I’d kind of say, “Okay, sure just go do this.” and they would of course come to me again because they didn’t learn anything. So next time I would go ahead and say to them, “Okay, I don’t have any time right now but I’ll get back to you,” and I’d make sure that time for the answer got longer and longer – which was my way of helping them to understand that I’m not an infinite oracle.

You have to do some work here. You have to learn how to do these things. I had to teach them.

Mel alongside early program alumni and “Junior,” the official MSE mascot, during the program’s 10th anniversary celebration.

Okay, so you’re back in Pittsburgh, working for Adtranz. How did you end up back with the MSE programs?

So what happened was, after working with new engineers in industry and with the Department of Defense engineers, I recognized that they just were not equipped, in many cases, to come into an organization and begin working efficiently or productively enough to make much of a difference on their teams.

Around the same time, Coach was planning a sabbatical and needed some help covering courses. He’d hired Tony (Lattanze) but he was still a bit short staffed. We’d kept in touch over the years and, so, he reached out and asked me if I’d be willing to help teach management and a few other courses. It took me about one microsecond to say, “That’s an interesting opportunity; I’d like to go ahead and try it.”

Seems like the transition there must have been pretty daunting. Had you taught before this point?

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And that kind of teaching mechanism is exactly what we do as mentors in the MSE program. We give hints, but only enough to drive the students to go find the information themselves. My teaching mechanisms very much aligned with what was being used in the program and so I realized I could probably do this fairly well.

Obviously the program’s gone through some pretty radical changes over the years and you’ve been involved with a lot of that evolution. What changes did you find the most exciting over the years and why were they so sort of compelling or interesting?

One of the most exciting ways we grew while I’ve been involved was this push for expanding our outreach; teaching people outside of CMU how to best go about engineering software.

Part of that was our efforts in working with international collaborators at other universities. One of my first assignments was to travel to South Africa to vet applicants to a program we had in conjunction with the South African government. This was a cohort composed entirely of women and, at that time, software in South Africa was a completely reactionary affair. But, let me tell you, a lot of those women who graduated from our program have gone on to do remarkable things with IT in South Africa.

Yes and no. When I was working for the DoD and/or Adtranz, people would come to me for help. I was very technically oriented in my abilities to understand how systems work and then be able to express that to people in a way that they could more easily understand.

Or another example: When I was the Distance Education Director we had 300 students being educated in the distance education program. Think about that: In any one year, we have maybe 100 students across all of the oncampus programs. We had three times that amount taking courses throughout the world.

And that’s where I adopted this idea with the young engineers. I would ask them when they would come to me for advice, “Do you want me to give you a hint or do you want me to answer your question?” And the ones I knew who would be successful were the ones who would say, “Give me a hint.”

And it was exciting being able to talk with engineers from a lot of different countries and see that, despite big cultural difference, the software development problems were the same. It was exciting to see that we were onto something important and that what we teach here has value across borders.

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Mel alongside senior program, departmental, university leadership pose for a group photo with graduates of the program’s South African colloborative education initiative. Mel played an instrumental part in shaping and managing the groundbreaking initiative in the early 2000’s.

What do you think is the next big challenge for the programs?

I think we are at a crossroads now. A lot of industry is much more fragmented than when the program was started.

If you’re developing software for Netflix, that is pretty radically different than how you are going to build systems for Boeing.

The program is going to have to realign itself. But change like that isn’t easy. It’s going to require some tough calls.

And, as anyone who has gone through the program can tell you, you have to be smart about making those calls. And that’s going to take a while because we have to have the data to measure success.

And I think we all – from the faculty, to the staff, to our alumni – understand that. We all understand that the best decisions require data to back them up; and, in turn, that data is only generated over time.

When I talk to alumni – whether they are in San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, etc – they all have a similar story: At some point, they get called up by management to justify some

decision they’ve made. They present their case and, as often as not, their presentation absolutely obliterates any competing presentation. And that’s because they’ve not only made a call, but they took the time to gather the data, analyze it, and craft a solid plan of action.

So, at the end of the day, I think that will likely be the biggest challenge for the program: Yes, it’s time to adapt.

We need to, for sure, but we have to be disciplined enough to do it right.

Okay, so the question everyone wants an answer to: What’s Mel’s next adventure? Where are you headed?

I hope to be going to work for the SEI. I’m going to go back to the government. I know it’s an oddity. I remember talking to Tony. He says, “You’re going back into that?”

But, where I am in my career now, I’ve taught a lot of students that have gone on to be tremendous engineers and leaders. I’ve worked with a lot of brilliant technical folks, through my outside consulting. But I realized that I really want to get back out into the industry, roll up my sleeves and see stuff built again.

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Mel talks shop over a meal with MSE founder and longtime director, James “Coach” Tomayko, and colleagues in late 1997. An early graduate of the MSE, Coach recruited Mel to return as an instructor after his time with the DoD and Adtranz.

Now, I’m not going to be pounding out code again or anything, that isn’t where my strengths lie. But there is this common misconception that managers don’t create anything. Jim Tomayko had a phrase. He said, “I have never seen a project fail because of great management.”

As a manager, if you’re doing your job right, understanding what needs to be coded and being able to point out areas to improve is the value you bring. And, what’s maybe even more important, is that it’s about being able to take great engineers and put them in the right slot, get them to do the right thing and empower them.

You’ve been teaching with the programs for a long time now. And, while you’ve definitely taught many students a great deal, I am sure you’ve been learning for yourself along the way. How is the SEI going to be richer for what you’ve learned here in the MSE? The fact of the matter is that great software engineers are extremely desirable in today’s market. Ask any recruiter.

And, as a teacher, it’s been my job to teach them the skills

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that make them such a hot commodity. On the flip side, as a manager, you have to understand not only how to identify that sort of talent, but also how to retain it? How do you make engineers happy? How do make the environment more interesting? Because the minute they start looking at the tons of opportunities around them, you’ve lost a great engineer.

And so, part of the issue is understanding how to motivate people to learn, motivate people to do the right things, and that’s what a teacher does. They’re motivators. They’re the people that go ahead and say, “Hey, have you thought about this? Have you tried this other thing?”

Good managers are few and far between. And understanding their people, talking to them, understanding what they need and then helping them do what they want to do – I think that’s really what I’ve learned from my time in the MSE that I can bring back to the SEI.

Kaviya Nammalwar (MSIT-SE ‘14), Mel, and Pratyusha Tiruveedhula (MSIT-SE ‘14) at the annual MSE Kick-Off Picnic at the Mel’s home. Mel graciously welcomed hundreds of students to the program and Pittsburgh by hosting this beloved event every year.

What’s the most gratifying part of the MSE? When you think back on your time being a teacher here, what are you going to remember?

For me it’s been being able to teach students from all different sorts of backgrounds to look at problems from different points of view – and that, sometimes, when people ask you questions, they’re not fighting with you.

They’re trying to understand you, to help you.

One of the core answers in the program is “It Depends.”

It’s our motto. It has a bunch of stuff built in there, but what I learned from the program is that when you ask the question, “Why?” young people take it as meaning, “Oh, I did something wrong and I now have to defend myself.” People who have experience understand that you’re looking for their reasoning. And, after they finish the program, a lot of those younger engineers are beginning to understand that as well.

It’s the engineering mindset. We’re trying to push students beyond qualitative assessment. And when you bring it into the realm of the quantitative by saying, “Well, how can you prove that or how do you know that?” People get a little bit uncomfortable because then it forces us to look at pain points or failings from a dispassionate stance.

When people become overly invested in the emotional aspects of their work then they begin to miss things – whether it’s intentional or subconscious – and when they’re forced to confront that they become uncomfortable and defensive. But in order to be effective as an engineer or to just get things done well, you have to be able to take a step back.

I think I’ll always remember the students who really got that; who took that to heart. Because thats a big step – not only professionally, but also personally. So, in that way, I’ll always think back fondly on watching my students grow, both as engineers as well as people.

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TOP GUN TO TOP TEACHER

Dave Root is a character. Quick with a joke or a smile, he is definitely “loving life.” And, after many years with the MSE programs, we are sad to say that Dave has moved on to his life’s next grand adventure. And, while we struggle to imagine it will be more exciting that flying in an F-14 Tomcat, we sat down with the beloved teacher to hear his story, learn about what’s next, and talk about how he’s grown as an instructor.

Alright, Dave, I know you’ve shared your story with many people over the years. But it’s always been in pieces – a story about Top Gun here, a story about college there – so let’s take it back to basics. Where’d you get your start?

Okay, so, I grew up in the Bay Area. Went to Berkeley for Computer Science.

For some reason that impresses people that I went to Berkeley. I don’t know why. They’ll say, “Why’d you go to Berkeley?” And all I can think is “It was next door and I had an ROTC scholarship?”

Dave (center) recieves his wings in 1980. His wings were pinned on by

So, initially, I was going to be a math major. But I had a little experience programming – my highschool had a computer you could program on, which was a big deal back then – so a lot of people around me told me I should take some course in computer science.

I didn’t actually declare my major in Computer Science until about two years into college. I started at Berkeley in 1974, which was the very first year there was a separate computer science department. It wasn’t until years later, looking back, that I realized how big a deal it was that I was at Berkley at that time.

So, I took classes all year and I worked as a programmer in the summer for a guy named Dr. Albert Ghiorso. His background is electrical engineering and he developed instruments for the Manhattan Project. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, he went on to develop and use a heavy ion linear accelerator to discover new elements in the elementary tree – Berkelium, Lawrencium, Californium.

Those were discovered by him.

He could make one or two molecules a minute of these new elements. And they used to get the results from their

his uncle, Howard Caldwell, an aviator with the US Marine Corp.

experiments and they would analyze it by hand and crunch it down.

So, over the summers, I wrote software to automatically analyze the results while the experiment was running.

Just to give you a sense of how ancient this all is: We were working on a Digital Corporation PDP 9 with a tape read-in that had a whopping 16 K of memory – and that was top of the line at the time!

That’s fascinating! But you didn’t go the software route; you wound up flying fighter jets with the Navy. How did that come about? Was there always a passion for flying?

I’ve always loved aviation. My father was one of the pioneers of radio controlled model airplanes and my uncle was a marine aviator in the 30’s before going on to fly for commercial airlines.

But I originally thought I wanted to serve on a submarine.

Then, between my junior and senior year of college, I did 66 days underwater with a ballistic missile submarine, the

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Dave and his daughter, Sarah, pictured together in 1992 after he returns from a 6 month deployment to the Persian Gulf, where he was involved in combat in Operation Southern Watch.

Dave pictured in flight in 1993 (He is in the rear seat). During his time with the Navy, Dave flew the famed F-14 Tomcat..

USS Ethan Allen, out of Guam. I got off the submarine and immediately thought, “You know, I don’t think this is what I want to do.”

From there I went on to stand up F-14 wings in Japan. I also had the privelege of working on the Admiral’s staff at North Highland. But, wherever I could, I kept flying.

So I ended up going off to flight school and I did well enough that I got my choice, which was West Coast F-14’s.

And from there I became an F-14 flight instructor and flew with a few different squadron over the years.

Unlike other faculty members, like Mel or Tony, you never went through the MSE program itself. So you didn’t really have a professional attachment to Carnegie Mellon that drew you back. How’d you wind up in Pittsburgh?

Eventually I was tapped to serve on the Admiral’s staff at Naval Air Station Miramar, which was later made famous by the movie, Top Gun. I’d been to Top Gun before, in 198586, as a student. But I was selected for this posting partly because I was a graduate, but also because I’d been serving as a fleet flight instructor for a number of years at that point.

I came originally as the Executive Officer for the ROTC group here in 1998. About two years into it they informed us that the commanding officer was going to retire. And so they contacted me and they said, “Well we don’t have anybody in the pipeline to be the CO. Will you stay on and do it?” So, during my last six months in the Navy, I was the Commanding Officer for ROTC here at CMU. All throughout, I was flying. After I moved to Pittsburgh, I wanted to get back in the cockpit again. I started looking around and I found the Kondor Flying Club. I called them up and they said, “Well, where do you work?” and I said, “Down in Oakland. I teach at Carnegie Mellon.” And they said that their president teaches there. So I walked over and met Jim Tomayko in his office on the fourth floor of Wean Hall, last office at the end of the hall. He says, “Well, come meet me up there.” So we met up and we went flying up to Erie. He wanted to see if I knew how to fly and I did.

Dave was always up to grab lunch with friends, colleagues and students. Here Dave goofs around with Jane Miller and Scott Parker (MSE ‘01).

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We flew together for two years. All that time, he was asking me about my interests and plans. He asked me to help him teach a distance class on management. I had no idea at the time, but he was sort of feeling me out as a potential teacher.

Probably the biggest thing I’ve learned from working with all of these students over the years – something that I’ve tried to teach them as well: You have to be able to sit there and say, “Now let’s analyze this. We have time.

We can analyze this before we make a decision that’s going to have ramifications that we would regret later on.”

About 6 months before my Navy commitment was up, he comes to me asked me if I’d ever thought about staying in Pittsburgh. I said, “Well if I had the right opportunity I would.” And then this letter shows up which I wasn’t expecting. It said we’re offering you a job as teaching faculty if you want to work with our distance education program.

I pretty much signed on the spot.

In what ways has the program evolved and grown over the years that you find most exciting?

I think it’s our reaction to the changing student demographics, industry needs, and how are we going to handle that.

Nothing moves fast here, but we’ve been able to make some pretty remarkable strides in shifting course content to address what our alumni tell us they need out in the workforce. For instance, we made changes to incorporate more coverage of Agile and took the time to bring in more content on the specialized architecture needs of particular domains.

Or even just realizing that the students coming to us did not have the foundational knowledge that was beaten

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Never one to miss out on a free lunch, Dave queues up for a hearty lunch of Korean food alongside students from KAIST.

Dave (bottom right) pictured alongside his fellow MSE instructors and administrators for the yearly kick-off of the 2007-08 academic year.

into my head as an undergrad. Programming is taught, these days, almost entirely in a vacuum. We’ve found that many students only had a vague understanding of how a computer, itself, works. And so, we made changes to the curriculum to bring them up to speed, to give them that basis that they needed to be successful with higher level concepts.

So we go to visit Scott. And, as we’re talking, he asks me if I ever thought about moving down to Texas. I told him that we’d thought about it – James was there and we’d always planned to move south eventually. We talked a bit about work and because he knows exactly what I did over here, he says, “Well, you’d be doing pretty much the same sort of things except you’d be teaching the developers at the DoD or at the Air Force.” The only downside, he said, is you have to wear a coat and tie every day. And I’m like, “Oh wow, that’ll be tough. [laugh].”

But, more than just incorporating new material, I think what is important about how we’ve grown, is that we aren’t losing sight of the engineering principles that make up the backbone of who we are. Yeah, we teach agile process.

But we teach that process needs to be FOLLOWED. There are rules and ways of doing things for a reason. We might move on to teaching the next big trending process but we’re still going to be helping students understand the value of a disciplined approach to that process.

Alright, Dave, you’ve been a hotshot fighter pilot and an awesome teacher. Whats next?

Okay, in short: I will be a consultant to the DoD, overseeing software development for the Air Force pay system, initially.

I’ll be working out of Joint Base San Antonio. My boss will actually be Scott Hissam who was a mentor here in the program for a long time.

How’d that come about? Through Scott?

I had another two years on my appointment here that I had thought I’d finish out before retiring permanently. But I was down in Austin, Texas, seeing my son, James, and we were visiting the Alamo when he says “You know Scott lives right near there?”

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So, basically everything I did here as a mentor and what I taught is what I’ll be doing. I’ll be talking to the developers and team managers and saying, ‘Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?’”

Although you said you’re basically going to continue mentoring teams, albeit in a different capacity. How do you think what you learned here is going to help you in that next position?

“It Depends”. No, seriously. I mean it.

The biggest thing with any project or any team is make sure you have all the data before you respond or react. I’ve seen it many times with students. Something stupid happens with the student. They turned in the paper late. And then you look into it and you find out, “Well they turned in the paper late ‘cause they were in the emergency room last night with a kidney stone” Contextual information is important. So get your data correct, get your ducks in a row. It’s very easy sometimes to get upset about something because of stress or pressure,

Dave pictured with his wife, Kathy, and Dr. Dan Lee (KAIST) at the MSE 25th Anniversary Reunion at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh.

but that leads to mistakes. It leads to poor decisions on a project or mishandling working relationships.

It’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learned from working with all of these students over the years – something that I’ve tried to teach them as well: You have to be able to sit there and say, “Now let’s analyze this. We have time. We can analyze this before we make a decision that’s going to have ramifications that we would regret later on.”

Dave, what’s the enduring memory or lesson that you’ve always going to hold onto from your time teaching here in the MSE? Really the enduring thing here for me is always going to be work with the students. It was different than the military.

We aren’t so much teachers here as we are mentors. It was

so fulfilling to work with people and let them discover for themselves what the answer is; helping to guide them a little bit so they didn’t get overly frustrated, to show them that they can do whatever they set their mind to doing if they are determined enough.

It takes failure and that’s hard for a lot of the students to handle. You learn from failure better than you do from success because you always remember failure. Doesn’t mean you strive for failure but it means that when it happens you need to figure out why it happened. Look back at how it won’t happen again and then press on.

Seeing the students take that to heart, seeing them years later reaping the benefits of that understanding... that’s something I’ll always remember.

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GOING DOWN THE PIPES MSE Team Mario worked alongside clients from Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy to build the back end infrastructure for the robotic decommissioning of nuclear facilities across the country.

A clean-up is underway. But unlike household spring cleaning the tidying up in progress by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) poses safety risks somewhat more substantial than a back that’s thrown out while trying to vacuum behind the sofa. That’s because the DOE is in the midst of a decades-long decommissioning of numerous uranium enrichment facilities across the country.

Gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment was an essential process for the production of weapons and reactor grade fissile material for decades. However, its time has passed and the facilities that once produced uranium by this method are being demolished. But before demolition can begin every foot of piping has to be assayed to ensure that the amount of uranium 235 is below safety threshold levels.

Finding these uranium deposits, though, is a monumental task. At the DOE’s former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, workers have performed more than 1.4 million measurements of facility piping. It is expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous work.

Prototype of the RadPiper pipecrawling robotic platform. The data it gathers on radioactive contamination is offloaded and processed by software designed by MSE Team Mario.

Enter Team Mario, the five-man MSE team tasked with developing a solution to this problem.

RadPiper and Mario

After a presentation by the CMU project lead, Dr. Red Whittaker, team members Abdulwahab Almorebah, Antony Durairaj, Bharath Hegde, Vaibhav Walia, and Kenji Yonekawa chose to sign on.

That’s about to change with a project by CMU Robotics Institute: RadPiper. Employing a new “disc-collimated” radiation sensor invented at CMU, the robot crawls through facility piping and takes detailed measurements of 235U contamination, allowing engineers to identify the segments which must be decontaminated and those which can be left in place for demolition.

“It was the most exciting project of the bunch because this was a system that was going to be used immediately in a practical setting,” explains Hegde. “RadPiper was actually going to be out there in the world making this task – which is pretty dangerous and time-consuming – significantly safer.”

While the sophisticated robotic platform and sensor array developed by the Robotics Institute (RI) performs its task flawlessly, the platform is not useful without some way for human engineers and project leaders to review, analyze, and store data from the robot itself.

But moreover, the project had potential far beyond the confines of the MSE program or even CMU. “As Red [Whittaker] was talking to us about the project, it was clear that if this is done right the technology has the possibility of not only helping people but also possibly growing into a real commercial product,” notes Team Mario’s Vaibhav

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Walia. “There is literally nothing else like this on the market.

Being a part of getting this product off the drawing board was really exhilarating.”

A Challenging Build As pitched by their clients in the Robotics Institute and the Department of Energy, the team had to come up with a solution that would allow onsite engineers to download and analyze data from 200 feet of piping.

And so they did, developing a system that downloads sensor data off the robot via a USB stick, interprets the raw sensor data, performs a series of analyses from which it can generate various reports, and then stores that report for future use in administrative and technical decision making or to feed other high-level systems in the PipeCrawling Activity Measurement System (PCAMS) or DOE ecosystem.

Sounds simple enough, right? Not so fast.

One of the more significant challenges the team had to face when designing their solution was the constrained nature of working with a large, mature, regulated organization like the Department of Energy. “We really had to think on our feet. There were a number of constraints.

For example, we had to figure out how to develop this on Windows – instead of our preferred OS, Linux – because that’s what the existing infrastructure ran on,” explains Mario’s Antony Durairaj. “The issue is that the data from the robot is in the rosbag format, which needs the Robot Operating System (ROS) to unpack. ROS works great on Linux but the version that the robot is using is not supported on Windows.”

After much experimentation and testing, the team settled on a fix that had the system running a ROS/Linux/Windows stack using Linux Subsystem for Windows to bridge the gap.

But challenges that arose from organizational infrastructure constraints weren’t the only thing keeping those five students up at night. “We had to interface the actual core computation code – given to us by the Robotics Institute – into our system,” Durairaj notes. “This is the core calculation sub-system that translates the raw data off the robot sensors into usable measurement data. This was code that we didn’t develop or maintain. It was entirely out of our hands. If we built in too many dependencies, even a

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small change on their side could break the system.”

But, not to be discouraged, the team addressed the challenge in the most efficient and clever way possible: insulate their system. “We put their code behind an interface. No matter what changes they make to their code, as long as it produces output in the interface’s specified format, our system can easily use it,” explains Mario’s Vaibhav Walia. “This way, now or in the future, we can decouple development work between the systems. It not only cuts down on the chance of miscommunication leading to system failure, but also helps teams work more efficiently since they don’t need to be keeping the other team so tightly in the loop.”

Looking Back But fast forward to fall 2018: The team is all but finished with their work and those late nights tooling with possible solutions to those challenges are behind them. The RadPiper platform is undergoing its testing at the Piketon site and the members of Team Mario are eagerly looking forward to their graduation in December.

For Kenji Yonekawa, while the exposure to robotic systems was interesting, what he believes he’ll carry with him throughout the rest of his career has less to do with the technology than it does the way in which large development projects are executed. “At the end of the day, we were able to deliver everything we said we were going to not because we’re better programmers but because we thought through the process, we tracked, we documented,” Yonekawa explains. “Because of what we experienced in this project, it just cements my belief that if you just hack out code, you’re never going to be as reliable as those who have a good process and follow it in a disciplined way.”

And while the value of a well-refined, nimble process is not missed by his teammates, Abdul Almorebah points out that it is not just in the process or the tooling that he believes he learned the most. “I am now a firm believer in reflective practice. After every big milestone, we’d sit down and really dig deep on what we did, what worked, what didn’t, and how we can do better the next time,” says Almorebah.

“Combining that with good data-gathering practices meant that we were able to demonstrate continuous improvement over time. That’s a pretty powerful way to build a product and earn your customer’s trust. I can see that and so many other things I’ve learned here in the MSE serving me really well in the years to come.”

2018 STUDENT PROJECTS 2018 MSE PROJECTS Clinical Data, Inc Student Team: Shipra Agrawal, Mayank Ambaliya, Runchen Yan, Jie Zang Clinical Data Inc. is a disruptive health care startup based in the greater Philadelphia area. Founded by senior bio-pharma and technology leaders, their Clinical Data Standardization and Risk Monitoring Platform “Clindata Cloud” lowers drug development costs and drives patient safety during clinical trials and a Clinical Decision Support System “SafeRxp”.

The student team was able to successfully architect and build SafeRxp. Working in Java, Python, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms they developed a micro services platform hosted on AWS cloud. SafeRxp enables personalized medicine and helps healthcare professionals to to predict and prevent adverse drug reactions.

Roadmap Generation for Autonomous Vehicles Student Team: Feiyang Liu, Tatsuya Nanjo, Sriram Koushik Uppili, Yue Wang For vehicles to either drive themselves or to provide advanced driver assist features, vehicles must have detailed roadmap databases. To facilitate this, the student team built a system that will enable such roadmap databases to be created from open sources such as OpenStreetMaps (OSM). Additionally, the team developed route selection capability that minimizes vehicle interactions and the effects of potential occlusions, optimizes for travel time, and considers vehicular safety.

Finally, the group developed a user interface that can be operated by passengers while providing feedback for passenger comfort.

Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute Student Team: Abdulwahab Almorebah, Antony Praveen Durairaj, Bharath Hegde, Vaibhav Walia, Kenji Yonekawa Uranium enrichment is essential for military applications to commercial power reactors. Early enrichment was accomplished by gaseous diffusion. Facilities using this outmoded process of enrichment are being decommissioned and demolished. These facilities have hundreds of miles of piping that contain uranium deposits from a few inches, to four feet in diameter. Before demolition, every foot of piping must be assessed to ensure that the amount of uranium residue is below threshold levels to minimize the potential for an ecological disaster.

Until now, technicians had to hand-inspect every square inch of the piping with a geiger counter while wearing a biohazard suit. This process put technicians at risk for exposure to radioactive materials and complete remediation of the enrichment site would have taken over one hundred years. The goal of the Pipe Crawling Activity Measurement System (PCAMS) is to achieve speed, accuracy, auto-analysis, auto-reporting, and auto-archiving with quality and economy not possible with manual inspection methods. The PCAMS system utilizes a robot platform to autonomously observe the inside of pipe walls that are up to four feet in diameter rather than manually measuring the uranium deposits with handheld instruments from outside the pipe.

The MSE team developed a software system for the PCAMS platform which downloads sensor data from the robot in the form of a Robot Operating System (ROS) bag file. The software analyzes the raw data for uranium deposits that are above safe thresholds and generates reports on these analyses. Using these reports, engineers can make decisions to safely remove pipes for recycling or send them off for remediation to remove excessive radioactive contaminants.

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2018 PROJECTS

2018 MSIT-SE PROJECTS Aqourn Student Team: Chen Li, Yifu Wu, Shuli (Shelly) Xia The student team designed and developed a mechanism by which users of the client’s debt management platform can leverage data collected in the platform to create robust and customized reports and visual representations.

Municipal finance officers and their service providers need to aggregate data from markets, day-to-day debt management activity, GIS data, and other census and economic data in order to complete various analyses to perform their duties. The student team developed functionality and a set of features to collect and expose critical data feeds, system-generated municipal debt data, and market data to the users in an efficient and compelling format while also allowing for the customization of reports and analyses. The majority of this work focused on providing various data visualization and graphing features to the software.

Carnegie Mellon Textile Lab Student Team: Yiqun Peng, Hao Ren, Xingchen Shen, Zezhi Wen Knitting machines are capable of fabricating any number of textile artifacts , from garments to plush toys. As part of the Carnegie Mellon Textiles Lab’s mission to make machine knitting universally accessible, the lab developed a machine-independent file format that describes knit patterns in low-level operations that readily translate to machine operations.

Unfortunately, the lab’s current backend translates “.knitout” files to “.dat” files which must be further processed by an expensive, buggy, and proprietary software system in order to convert it into a “.000” machine-readable format.

The MSIT-SE student team addressed this by implementing a direct “.knitout” to “.000” backend. The implementation produced a basic disassembler for the .000 format, further developing it as an intuitive, cross-platform commandline application for the backend in node.JS. Moreover, the team layered in extensive error-checking and warning generation, with particular attention paid to machine state tracking in an effort to ease end-user troubleshooting.

CSIRO (Data61) Student Team: Aditya Kamble, Xue Liu, Dongliang Zhou Blockchain enables an evolving set of parties to maintain a safe, permanent, and tamper-proof ledger of transactions without a central authority. While popularized by cryptocurrencies, the technology could also be used to power a more trustworthy, agile, efficient mode of executing collaborative business transactions.

Building on CSIRO’s current graphical user interface tool to support inter-organizational business processes through blockchain technology, the student team designed and implemented a system to autogenerate, deploy, and test Hyperledger Fabric Smart Contract code from Business Process Model Notation diagrams. In addition to a rapid ramp-up on Ethereum, Hyperledger, and CSIRO’s current tool, the team delivered a product that was rigorously tested using numerous realistic process models to assure quality.

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NASA JPL Student Team: Miaojiang Deng, Qingqing Tong, Changjian Zhang Component-based frameworks have an enormous potential to lower the cost of flight software while also improving its quality. They can provide reusable infrastructure with proven flight heritage. They can generate efficient implementations from compact, high-level specifications. They can provide reusable components with well-defined interfaces. Finally, by enforcing structured communication, component-based frameworks can enable automatic checking of program correctness properties. To realize this potential, flight software engineers need a simple way by which to specify component interfaces and their connections.

In this follow-on project, the MSIT-SE team continued the work of the prior 2017 MSE team that had developed modeling language and tools for specifying spacecraft flight software as a set of interconnected reusable components.

More specifically, the 2018 team designed and built two new significant capabilities to the framework: • •

Specification and checking of additional system properties, such as required port connections, resource usage, and concurrency of active components and guarded ports.

Visualization of component interfaces and their connections. The team developed a method of producing intuitive system diagrams thereby allowing engineers to quickly understand the current system layout and be able to adjust the formatting to suit their needs.

Machine Vision System Architecture Student Team: Jiabei He, Yue (Max) Li, Ke Xie In machine vision research, much work is done by a variety of low-level component algorithms linked together by computer programs. These are known as pipelines. While the algorithms may not change between two programs, swapping out different pipelines radically alters the output of a given component/pipeline combination.

A significant amount of time is wasted building the pipelines from scratch for each project. The Point Vision student team designed and developed a system architecture that simplifies the process of connecting together components and pipelines. The developed architecture provides services for memory, handling, sending messages and handing results between the algorithms, and orchestrating execution of the algorithms in the pipeline. Furthermore, the team developed a mechanism in the form of a configuration file that permits the user to glean which algorithms are used, how these are connected together, provides a facility for passing parameters for each of the algorithms, and defines the execution order.

Wisy Student Team: Nijanthan Hariharan, Cheng-Hung (Krammer) Liu, Prachi Shah, Tao (Tom) Yu Wisy (formerly Interfase) is an augmented reality platform to crowdsource data collection in the real world. It encompasses a portfolio of gamified apps that drive user behavior to collect business listing as well as user purchase pattern information across a wide range of industries such as retail, entertainment, and infrastructure.

Using data processing tools such as IBM Watson, the student team designed and developed a prototype that utilizes Wisy data to answer questions about the composition and activity of retail, entertainment, and infrastructure industries in a given area. Built using Java and node.JS, the project encompassed such challenges as data cleansing, data analysis, cognitive analysis and predictions.

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2018 PROJECTS

Werksoft Student Team: Huijun Feng, Ruihan (Ryan) Wang, Fan Xie, Jiakai Zhang Hyper-location is a term that describes location-based functionality used to determine when two or more smart phone clients are within a few feet (or tens of feet) from each other. Werksoft has adopted the term “Ephemeral” as the name of a component to provide hyper-location services.

To this end, the student team designed and developed a prototype Ephemeral component which runs as a service on the Android platform. Operating in the background, the service uses a combination of coarse-grained geolocation and limitedduration fine-grained localization to provide much more robust location data. In addition to core location functionality, the student team built a lightweight client application and UI for testing and implementation.

Zisquared Investments, Inc. Student Team: Yuzhu (Ava) Gao, Shivani Jha, Chaoyi Jiang MSIT-SE students leveraged machine learning algorithms in the design and development of a decision support system in a stock selection process for investment portfolio construction. The system allows clients to recognize patterns in stock price movements, enabling them to predict future stock prices. In addition to developing data analysis capabilities, using a corpus of 650 stock performance profiles, the team also allowed for reporting and compelling visualization capabilities in the platform.

2018 SSN MSIT-SE PROJECTS Steel Smiling Student Team: Laxmi Priya Dharshini Suresh Kumar, Anjana Krishnamurthi, Rishiha Kalakata Steel Smiling is an organization that bridges the gap between community members and mental health support through education, advocacy, and awareness.

Steel Smiling’s research determined that a substantial number of African-American community members in Pittsburgh lack access to adequate and ongoing mental health support. The student team designed and developed a web-based application to serve as a platform for users to engage with and support each other anonymously in an informal and digital forum. It also aims to help mental health providers increase awareness about their services for users.

TripleCheck Student Team: Prathik Kotian, Laxshmi Abhigna Batchu, Kavya Singaravel As part of its security research, TripleCheck now has a database of 1.4 billion jeopardized credentials from data breaches spanning several years. Not only is this data invaluable for password selection research, but it could also be used to develop a security check for newly generated passwords, thereby mitigating the risk that an attacker could guess a user’s password using a list of compromised credentials.

With a database the size of TripleCheck’s, traditional queries take far too long. To address this, the MSIT-SE student team developed an open source tool, one built in Java, Javascript, and leveraging the bloom filter variant, that reduces the offline password verification response time from 10-50 seconds to 1-2 seconds.

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2018 MSIT-ESE PROJECTS Magic Leap Student Team: Yannan Liu, Tanmay Patil, Wei-Chia Yen, Yumo Zhang, Ankur Gumber The assembly of optical systems generally requires a complex, multi-dimensional optimization problem to be solved.

Together with their client, the MSIT-ESE team designed and developed a tool to perform much of this optimization with a significant reduction in effort on the part of engineers.

The team developed an alignment system that allows for the development of new modules to handle variation in camera, image processing, and motion control hardware/algorithms. Additionally, as performance was a key concern, the team needed to ensure that the system was capable of handling the load yet not lose pace with the 100 Hz frame rate of the system’s standard camera, all the while ensuring that the system would run in distributed format.

Harm Reduction Therapeutics Student Team: Soham Donwalkar, Yu-Sam Huang, Puneetha Ramachandra, Rashmi Ramesh As noted earlier in this edition, opioid overdose deaths continue to rise year after year. The result is that we are now in a national health crisis.

To address this, the MSIT-ESE student team developed a prototype wristband that detects overdose in the wearer. Using pulse-oximetry, the device monitors the amount of oxygen in the user’s blood by measuring light reflected back to a sensor on the skin. When paired over bluetooth to a mobile phone, the sensor takes numerous readings on an ongoing basis to establish a baseline reading. If the user’s blood oxygen level drops for longer than a defined period of time, the wristband switches an LED on its display from green to red. The device also cues the paired mobile phone (via an app that the team also developed) to send a message with the user’s GPS coordinates to his/her emergency contact.

Soham Donwalkar, Rashmi Ramesh, and Puneetha Ramachandra of Team Hashtag presented their prototype wearable as a part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Opioid Challenge at the Health 2.0 Conference this past fall. Bringing together the top minds and capital investors in the health sciences and technology fields, the MSE team went head-to-head against some of the most promising new tech in a pitch competition – in the end claiming 3rd place from over 90 entries!

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2017 STUDENT PROJECTS 2017 MSE PROJECTS LH Ventures Student Team: Nicholas Jurgens, Xinyi (Jae) Jiang, Vignesh Shankar, Shakti Pratap Singh, Yu Zhou Building upon a successful 2016 MSE project that developed UX capabilities for wholesalers to assess performance and improve profitability, the student team designed and developed features that allow for greater high-level business analyses, expand the platform’s range of compatible data types, and facilitate the mass export of system data to external revenue recovery systems.

NASA JPL Student Team: Swati Dhawan, Yifei Liu, Kunal Yadav, Jianan Zheng Component-based frameworks have a high potential to lower the cost and improve the quality of flight software. They can provide reusable infrastructure with proven flight heritage. They can generate efficient implementations from compact, high-level specifications. They can provide reusable components with well-defined interfaces. Finally, by enforcing structured communication, component-based frameworks can enable automatic checking of program correctness properties. To realize this potential, flight software engineers need a simple way in which to specify component interfaces and their connections.

To that end, the MSE team developed tools for specifying spacecraft flight software as a set of interconnected reusable components. Using the tools, developers can (1) specify the interfaces to individual components; (2) specify a flight software application as a graph describing the components and their connections; and (3) automatically generate a partial implementation from the specifications.

Sponsor a project!

Do you want to help shape the education of some of the brightest young minds in software while also helping your organization meet your strategic goals?

Consider proposing a sponsored project today For more information on project sponsorship, see page 11 of this publication.

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2017 MSIT-SE PROJECTS Software Architecture Layout Student Team: Nguyen Dinh, Zhikun Lao, Shashwat Tandon Presenting a diagram of an architecture is a key part of communicating architectural information, design, etc. But simply generating a diagram is not so easy. For large architecture diagrams, manual layout can quickly become cumbersome. For architectures that have been automatically recovered from existing systems whose documentation has been lost, there is no layout information available. There are many existing layout algorithms that exist for laying out graphs. However, when they are applied to architectures, the layouts are unsatisfying and fail to communicate the inherent architecture structure that a designer intends or architects expect.

To address this, the student team designed and developed an extension to the client’s AcmeStudio Eclipse plugin, which not only allows architecture style designers to specify layout rules that are used to tailor existing algorithms but can also be applied to architecture instances by designers, combining layout styles from multiple styles, and customization.

Aqourn Student Team: Ravishankar Anantha Padmanab, Shan Han, Tianbing Leng, Junyuan Zhang The student team designed and developed additional capability for Aqourn’s cloud-based solution which helps a wide range of state and local public agencies manage their long term debt.

The new capabilities, built on Aquorn’s existing alpha platform, enables users to: upload PDF documents; visually tag text in the document as their respective obligation attributes; and extract these data values from the document while also maintaining tags that allow links to various sections of the document.

Additionally, the team designed and developed a visualization system that can be embedded into a website so as to allow various streams of data values to be visually represented (i.e., cash flows, analytics, market rates, and trends).

CSIRO (Data61) Student Team: Xin (Rachel) Huang, Yazid Hamdi, Jiawei Li, Yuchao Zhou To address the extensive runtime of current continuous integration toolchains, the MSIT-SE team built a framework for continuous integration that consists of a machine learning segment integrated within the pipeline. With appropriate training, the machine learning component can detect upon commit the thoroughness of the test suites to be run. For example, indicators in unit tests may point to possible performance issues; in turn, the full performance test suite may be run.

Motivation for Excellence Foundation Student Team: Minghan Fu, Sonia Gupta, Ruoyao Li, Renfei Song The Motivation for Excellence Foundation (MFE) has started and is currently operating the Nalanda project, a project that aims to bring about a drastic qualitative and quantitative change in student learning outcomes, student engagement, and teacher effectiveness in low income municipal and private classrooms in India. The project aims to leverage a low cost and scalable technology platform that will enable students and teachers to utilize world class digital content that is mapped to the local curriculum and combine it with the most advanced blended learning pedagogical tools.

As a part of this project, student team members developed a web-based software system that enables all members of the Nalanda ecosystem – teachers, school administrators, government officials, students, parents, donors etc. – to monitor and analyze the volumes of data collected by the project and stored in the cloud.

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2017 PROJECTS

SEI CERT VDM Student Team: Yuheng Huang, Xiolei Peng, Linda Wu As many organizations work toward a culture of continuous process improvement, the instrumentation of their software development lifecycle becomes increasingly more important with respect to the measurement, monitoring, and analysis of the work being produced.

The student team worked diligently to bring the client’s Virtual Development Manager (VDM) system into full operation.

VDM collates and presents real-time project data so managers and stakeholders only need a quick browser visit to see valuable information including task progress, development activities, and workload among developers.

VDM persists data generated by source control management (SCM), issue tracker, and continuous integration (CI) systems. As an extensible software system, VDM supports pluggable adapters, so a team can have the VDM interface for any issue tracker or continuous integration (CI) instance by coding the appropriate adapter. VDM consists of a webbased front end for user interaction and reporting, a persistent data store for data storage, and various system service components to connect and integrate with various software development tools.

The team not only worked to identify and resolve persistent issues in the early alpha builds, but also enabled integration into the Bamboo continuous integration system. Furthermore, they designed and developed an administrative interface for the web application to facilitate configuration and monitoring of the various connectors.

2017 SSN MSIT-SE PROJECTS AIDU (SCS) Student Team: Hari Priya Tiruveedhula, Varun Murali, Sriram Jaikrishnan, Nirav Vyas Foreign language learning has traditionally been situated within the classroom, with few opportunities for students to use the language that they are learning in a social setting to build relationships. The client’s language learning tool, AIDU, permits face-to-face and text-based chat affordances thereby enabling students to better develop their interactional competence, a capability lacking in many technology enhanced language learning systems such as Duolingo. Using basic geo-locative functionality, AIDU allows users to identify and then interact with other app users in their vicinity, pairing users based upon their language profiles.

To aid in the app’s development, the student team designed a system using existing open source software that allows users to do just that. Additionally, the team built app functionalities which allow the development of conversationally compelling user profiles as well as enable users to be notified when compatible language partners are in their immediate vicinity. Lastly, the team designed and developed functionality within the app that allows users to solicit feedback on their use of language during a chat session.

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Risk Management Game Student Team: Dinesh Parthiban, Ajay Krishna Akkineni, Arul Dhana Saam Prakash Antron Xavier Arul Building upon the success of prior MSIT projects, the 2017 MSIT Risk Management Game team developed functionality to enrich the game. The system, as given to the 2017 team, was a game that allows users to see a dashboard that simulates a software project. The basic layout and web pages had been completed, but the administration aspect of the game was not functional.

In collaboration with their sponsors, the team designed and developed the game system’s backend. This included the development of a suite of metrics and measurements capabilities needed by course instructors to effectively evaluate team performance (i.e., time in game per user, number of games played, number of risks mitigated, types of risks mitigated, problems encountered for lack of risk mitigation, winners, losers, etc).

TripleCheck Student Team: Adivandhya Ramkumar Bangalore, Dhruv Prajayprajay Prakash, Aswin Ram Sivaraman Venkataraman, Yazhini Chellam Konguvel To enable their client to more efficiently discover plagiarized software portions, the MSIT team designed and developed a system capable of learning what a software license “looks like” based upon available, initial corpus of 400 software licenses. Powered by a machine learning core, the system is capable of running locally so as to ensure data privacy, and can process about 1000 files/minute on a typical laptop with an Intel i7 CPU.

2017 MSIT-ESE PROJECTS Mobile Contextual Awareness Student Team: Sai Hari Chandana Kalluri, Rajat Deepak Mathur, Yu-Lun Tsai To facilitate the development of contextually-aware mobile applications, members of the MSE team developed a system that can dynamically discover all of the sensors in a smartphone (e.g., accelerometer, GPS, compass), subscribe to observations from these sensors, and store observations in a unified format. Additionally, the system was designed with a flexible architecture to plug in any new sensors (hardware/software) as they arrive in a use case.

TurtleBot Student Team: Anindya Gautam, Aditya Mathur, Rashmi Ramesh, Yunpeng Xu TurtleBot is a low-cost, personal robot kit with open source software, built using off-the-shelf components. It enables researchers to use the platform to experiment and explore. The student team designed and developed a software package that: • •

•

Enhances how a TurtleBot can be configured at run-time. This includes not only the ability to swap navigation/control algorithms at run-time, but also a mechanism to easily add new physical components to the robot at any time.

More accurately monitors the system’s status including situations such as a faulty sensor or misaligned actuator. The team designed both the functionality to collect system data in a uniform and extensible way as well as developing system models to define “correct behavior” within the system.

Enriches navigation capabilities by building system functionality that enables calculations based off of the existing instruction graph interface, thereby allowing researchers to determine factors such as energy usage or time require to complete a given path.

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HONORS AND COMMENDATIONS MSE Program Inducted into IEEE CSEE&T Hall of Fame The Master of Software Engineering Professional Programs was honored in Fall 2017 with the induction of their flagship degree program, the Master of Software Engineering, into the IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training’s (CSEE&T) Hall of Fame.

CSEE&T serves as the foremost meeting for software engineering educators worldwide.

The event offers educators and industry professionals the opportunity to share and expand their knowledge of software engineering education, training, and professional issues.

The goal of the CSEE&T Hall of Fame is to improve and share software engineering education and training practices by identifying the best examples in the field. Those elected to membership in Hall of Fame represent the highest achievement in their field, serving as models of what can be achieved – and how – in software engineering education and training.

Carnegie Mellon’s Master of Software Engineering degree program (MSE) was recognized for its foundational role in the development of software engineering curricula. Particularly, the MSE was noted for its trailblazing development of the “Studio” comprehensive development projects. Providing students with a team-based, mentored, multi-semester engagement with external clients, the Studio went far beyond a common “capstone”, allowing students to “learn by doing” as they apply skills and techniques derived from complementary core and elective courses.

Garlan Named Associate Dean for Master’s Programs David Garlan, professor of computer science in the Institute for Software Research, has been named associate dean for master’s programs in the School of Computer Science.

“We are very lucky to have David in this role because he was one of the original pioneers of master’s education within the college, successfully nurturing the Master of Science in Software Engineering to its current status as the gold standard around the world for graduate education in software engineering,” said SCS Dean Andrew Moore.

A faculty member since 1990, Garlan developed several required courses for the Master of Software Engineering program. His 1996 textbook with Mary Shaw, “Software Architecture: Perspectives of an Emerging Discipline”, was the early definitive textbook of the field. In 2002, Garlan became director of Software Engineering Professional Programs, where he led the evolution of the original Master of Software Engineering program to a suite of professional programs with specific themes.

Garlan has received numerous honors for his contributions to software engineering, most recently receiving the Nancy Mead Award for Excellence in Software Engineering Education.

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Prachi Shah (pictured back row, third from left) alongside other recipients, recieved an honorable mention at the 2018 NCWIT Summit on Women and IT for her brain imaging project, VOXEL.

MSIT-SE Student Recognized at NCWIT Prachi Shah (MSIT-SE ‘18), was given honorable mention for the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Collegiate Award during the 2018 NCWIT Summit on Women and IT in Dallas, Texas.

Housed at the University of Colorado’s ATLAS Institute, the NCWIT is a national non-profit organization that works to increase the meaningful participation of girls and women in computing. The NCWIT Collegiate Award is an annually conferred award which recognizes technical contributions to projects that demonstrate a high level of innovation and potential impact.

Shah’s project, “VOXEL - A Tool to Plan Brain Surgeries”, addresses limitations in the visualization tools currently in use by neurosurgeons to plan and prepare for brain surgery. Using 3D printing and virtual reality technologies, VOXEL allows researchers to forgo traditional boilerplate planning modalities by creating a precise, one-to-one physical model of a specific patient’s brain. This approach allows neurosurgeons to more closely tailor their surgical approach to the unique physical characteristics of each individual patient’s brain, greatly reducing the risk of misaligned presurgical planning.

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HONORS Shaw Honored for Inspiring Women in Software Engineering The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) named ISR’s Mary Shaw winner of the 2017 IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Leadership Award. The award was presented to Shaw at the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The TCSE’s WISE Award is presented annually to an individual for outstanding and/or sustained leadership in the software engineering community, particularly where it concerns encouraging women to explore science and engineering career paths.

Shaw, a computer science faculty member since 1971, is a leader in software engineering research whose work on software architecture – the large-scale structure of software systems – helped establish it as a recognized discipline. Selecting an appropriate architecture is now recognized as a critical step in the engineering of complex software systems for everything from the anti-lock braking systems in cars to the international banking system.

She also is an educational innovator who has developed computer science curricula from the introductory to the doctoral level, including graduate programs targeted at software professionals.

Shaw carries the ceremonial mace at Commencement 2018. The honor is bestowed only on recipients of Carnegie Mellon’s highest education honor, the Robert E. Doherty Award for Sustained Contributions to Excellence in Education.

In honoring Shaw, the WISE selection committee pointed to numerous examples of her achievements – including her role in the foundation of the Software Engineering Institute and the field of software architecture, inspiring talks at notable conferences such as the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing; and monumental awards like the United States’ National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

The committee noted that it was, “Shaw’s pioneering leadership in education over four decades; her exceptional advocacy and enduring mentorship for women at all levels in science, engineering, and technology through a wide array of activities; as well as her numerous awards as a role model for women in the field which very clearly warranted this award.”

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the first conference in software engineering.

Check out the Fall 2018 edition of IEEE Software for pieces on the rich history and promising future of the field by alumni, faculty, and friends of the MSE – including: David Garlan, Claire Le Goues, Nancy R. Mead, Ipek Ozkaya, and Mary Shaw.

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Tomayko Scholarship The 2018 James E. Tomayko Scholarship was awarded to Kenji Yonekawa (MSE ‘18). Kenji holds a bachelor and a master degree in Information Technology from Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.

During his time in the MSE program, Kenji demonstrated an exceptionally strong commitment to his academics, earning exemplary marks in all of his formal courses, but also to the success of his MSE Studio, the RadPiper project.

“As his project team’s mentor, I have observed Kenji lead his team, manage complex customer situations, and negotiate between various competing interests throughout the project,” notes MSE Director, Tony Lattanze. “Kenji continually went above and beyond, even making several trips to the Portsmouth Nuclear Enrichment facility in Ohio to meet with stakeholders. And all without ever missing a beat on his other academic obligations.”

Lattanze further notes that it is Kenji’s sense of humor and his positive attitude that enabled his success. “It’s no secret that life in the MSE programs can get extremely stressful. Even when things got tough, Kenji continued to handle his duties with a grace, humor, and excellence that enriched all around him. Kenji embodies all that we look for in an MSE alumni. I expect great things from him.”

It is our supreme pleasure to thank Kenji for all of his hard work and to congratulate him on this very well-deserved honor.

Eduardo and Norma Frias Scholarship Named in honor of the parents of MSE alumnus Eduardo Frias, this scholarship seeks to further the mission shared by both Frias as well as the MSE Programs: to educate the next generation of software engineering leaders who will go on to improve the state of the practice.

The 2018 Eduardo and Norma Frias Scholarship was awarded to Abdulwahab Almorebah (MSE ‘18). His nominators noted that Abdul demonstrated unwavering commitment to academic excellence and his drive to simultaneously lead and serve. Abdul demonstrated this in both his willingness to volunteer for, and his capability in excelling at, his role as Studio Manager. Furthermore, the committee noted that he “earned the respect of [his] peers, and the noted appreciation of the program faculty and directorship.”

On behalf of the program, we extend our most sincere congratulations to Abdul and thank him for all that he has done. We are certain to be watching his career unfold with hopeful anticipation.

Master of Software Engineering Program Graduate Fellowship We are happy to announce that Changjian (CJ) Zhang (MSIT-SE ‘18) has been selected as our 2018 MSE Research Fellow.

As an student, CJ excelled far beyond all expectations with respect to his academic pursuits. Dr. David Garlan, who nominated him for the award, noted that CJ was “one of the best students in the Models of Software Systems course, and he followed up on that course with two independent studies in which he investigated a formal method called TLA+”.

As a research fellow, CJ’s work has him exploring a crucial problem in reconfigurable robotics: How can we define the “safe” state for a robotics platform (a state which is necessary to adjust the system configuration) as well as provide assurances that the loosely-coupled systems inherent to robotic platforms will, in fact, be placed in said “safe” state? Alongside Garlan and his group, CJ is developing a solution to this problem that will provide both formal assurance and be efficiently implementable.

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NEW FACES Marlana Pawlak The programs are happy to welcome Marlana Pawlak as its newest member of the MSE staff this past summer.

Marlana holds a bachelor of arts in english from Allegheny College.

Prior to joining the MSE, Marlana worked in success advising at Argosy University. In her new position as Masters Programs Administrator, Marlana will provide support to the programs and its students including admissions coordination, course registration, and administrative services.

Please join us in welcoming Marlana!

Sujata Telang We are also excited to announce that Sujata Telang joined the faculty of the MSE this past fall.

Sujata is no stranger to CMU, however. She has taught and advised seemingly countless students and teams as an instructor with the former MSIT-eBusiness program, where she was on the faculty for the past 14 years. As the program’s newest teaching faculty member, Sujata has already hit the ground running with Studio/Project/ Seminar related tasks across the MSE/MSIT/MITS programs, as well as co-teaching on some core courses.

Please join us in welcoming Sujata to the programs!

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FACULTY AND STAFF NEWS Travis Breaux Requirements engineering work by Dr. Travis Breaux and his students this past year made considerable progress in two directions: Hermeneutics and Requirements Analysis Privacy policies and laws impact software systems by bounding the design space within what is permitted, prohibited, and required of multiple parties. Dr. Breaux and his students formalized policy and legal requirements to answer relevant design questions at increasing scale, e.g., multiple parties, policies, and across organizational and system boundaries.

Dr. Breaux and his team have two efforts to increase scale: his student, Jaspreet Bhatia (SE, PhD student) is studying ways to automatically extract formal privacy specifications from policies by integrating crowdsourcing and natural language processing (NLP), which extends the group’s 2014 work and appeared in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) in 2016. Her work shows the technical limitations of each approach and the combined benefit of a hybridized workflow that improves precision and recall. This has also led to a new theory of vagueness that combines NLP and psychometrics to predict the impact of vague phrases on requirements comprehension, which she presented at the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) 2016 and published in the Journal of Legal Studies.

The psychometrics results were extended and published in the ACM Transactions on Human Computer Interaction (TOCHI) in 2018.

Another of Breaux’s students, Morgan Evans (SE, PhD student) is extending the ontological foundations for expressing privacy requirements specifications to reason about policies. This work addresses the generally ignored ontology problem discovered in their work that formalized the collection and use limitation privacy principles.

Finally, Dr. Breaux’s advisee, Mitra Bokaei Hosseini (PhD student, UT San Antonio) is studying methods to construct ontologies from privacy policies while integrating public, developmental, and legal interpretations of “data” to reason about privacy requirements from multiple viewpoints and value-based systems. This work has led to new ways to analyze mobile apps for compliance with privacy policies, which appears in the group’s 2016 and 2018 ICSE research track papers.

Requirements Composition and Risk Assessment Security and privacy requirements analysis methods and tools are limited by human cognitive abilities to perceive, comprehend, and project future threat scenarios.

Another of Dr. Breaux’s students, Hanan Hibshi developed an experimental protocol to study whether security requirements serve to increase or decrease the overall security rating of a system. This study was published in RE 2015 and extended for RE 2017 and applies factorial vignettes and multi-level modeling to test for requirements independence. In addition, she discovered that analysts have several strategies for mitigating threats in ambiguous specifications, including security refinements, replacements, and reinforcements that vary with analysts’ expertise levels. Her current work was published in IEEE SSCI 2016 and adapts Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Systems to model analysts’ reasoning about how to improve security through requirements composition.

Dr. Breaux also spoke this year as a part of the 2018 NCSA and Nasdaq Cybersecurity Summit on the threat of cyberattack on our nation’s voting infrastructure as well as, more broadly, on rising trends in cyber warfare. And, finally, Breaux – alongside his student Jaspreet Bhatia – took home best paper at the 26th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE ‘18) for their work ““Semantic Incompleteness in Privacy Policy Goals”.

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NEWS

David Garlan In addition to being named the Associate Dean for Master’s Programs in SCS this past year, Dr. Garlan’s work on self-adaptive systems continued to make great strides.

Dr. Garlan’s ABLE group continued to improve their Rainbow framework. A framework for developing self-adaptive systems that focuses on architectural models of systems to monitor, reason about, and adapt running systems, Rainbow allows self-adaptive capabilities to be added to existing systems, trading-off multiple business concerns and capturing domain-specific adaptation strategies and operations. ABLE researchers made progress in defining new semantics for its repair language, devising a new set of techniques for run-time fault localization, incorporating reasoning about human-in-the-loop strategies, and exporting tools and techniques to several other research sites.

Additionally, Dr. Garlan and his team continued to apply self-adaptive techniques to security including the continued exploration of proactive and latency-aware adaptation – adapting the system in anticipation of future problems.

The group also shifted their focus from purely automated adaption to a hybridized model. Calling this approach “Mixed-initiative adaptation”, Garlan’s team is looking at providing more interplay between human operators and autonomic mechanisms through the use of stochastic multi-player games to reason about appropriate times to interact with human operators.

Beyond his research, Dr. Garlan delivered the keynote, “Human-machine synergy: Bringing humans and autonomy into balance”, at the 11th IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO). He was also recognized for his contributions to software engineering education. In May 2017, he was awarded the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) Distinguished Education Award and, following closely on, Dr. Garlan was also tapped to receive the Nancy Mead Award for Excellence in Software Engineering Education at the 2017 Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T).

Jim Herbsleb Dr. Jim Herbsleb’s research has made a number of exciting advances this past year, including: • • • •

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Ongoing development of a systematic, empirically-based understanding of how, when, and why hackathons/codefests/sprints are effective collaboration modes.

Studying the practices, community values, and technical effects across a range of development ecosystems as they relate to the management of cost in breaking changes.

Applying the common pool resource model to maintenance effort in open source ecosystems to understand sustainability.

Modeling the survival of open source projects to explore the role of position in the ecosystem network in project dormancy.

Nancy Mead Dr. Nancy Mead, SEI Fellow, Adjunct Professor of Software Engineering, and CyLab Faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, was elected to the IEEE Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) Executive Board as Member at Large for a 2-year period starting in November 2018.

Additionally, Mead contributed a number of publications and spoke on a variety of topics last year including: • • • • •

•

Contributed a book chapter on Software Security Engineering in 2018 to a rewrite of Pressman and Maxim’s book: Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach.

Delivered courses on SQUARE and Threat Modeling in 2018 as part of an SEI online certificate program in Cybersecurity Engineering.

Delivered a keynote address, entitled “Adventures in Threat Modeling” at the SECSE workshop in Portugal during May 2018. This talk was also presented at SEI and CyLab. Published a paper with co-authors Mary Shaw and David Garlan for the 50th anniversary issue of IEEE Software, titled “Half a Century of Software Engineering Education: The CMU Exemplar”.

Presented a conference paper, “Crowd Sourcing the Creation of Personae Non Gratae for Requirements-Phase Threat Modeling” at the International Requirements Engineering Conference in September 2017.

Published an SEI report in 2018, on threat modeling research, titled A Hybrid Threat Modeling Method. Co-authors include: Forrest Shull, Krishnamurthy Vemuru, and Ole Villadsen.

Mary Shaw This past year brought truly tremendous news for Dr. Mary Shaw. In a single academic year, she was the recipient of the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence (alongside Dr. David Garlan and Dr. Bradley Schmerl) as well as the Robert E. Doherty Award for Sustained Contributions to Excellence in Education.

These awards represent the highest university honors a faculty member can recieve in both research and education, respectively.

In addition to her receipt of the IEEE TCSE Distinguished Women in Software Engineering Award, Dr. Shaw was also tapped to deliver the annual A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture at Carnegie Mellon’s Qatar campus. Named in honor of the late inaugural Dean of the School of Computer Science, Nico Habermann; the lecture series enables students to engage with prominent faculty and well-known leaders in the field of computer science.

On a personal note: Western Pennsylvania has wonderful outdoor recreational opportunities close to Pittsburgh. Mary Shaw and her husband, Roy Weil, wrote the guidebook “Free-Wheeling Easy in Western Pennsylvania” to introduce bicyclists to the network of recreational and touring trails that offer smooth gentle grades through luscious countryside, free of the distractions of truck and auto traffic. Their most recent volume, the fourth edition, covers trails northeast of Pittsburgh, in the Allegheny River and Kiskiminetas River watersheds.

All proceeds from the book go to support trail development via the Trail Volunteer Fund ( https://they-working.org/ ) The book is available from local bike shops or on Amazon.

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