Impact Through Innovation
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Front cover
ANNUAL REPORT
2015 - 2016
Lero brings together the leading academic researchers in software from right across the Irish 3rd level sector. Working with industry partners, we investigate the major software challenges of the day, generating novel solutions and innovative new business opportunities.
Contents 02
Message from the Director
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The Lero Executive Committee
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Lero’s Vision and Mission
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Lero Research
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Lero Industry Partnership
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Lero Outreach
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Where are they now?
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Message from the Director Software is at the heart of a modern global economy. We are one of the infrastructural reasons why nine out of the ten top software companies in the world are located in Ireland.
2014 was an important year for Lero. Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton, and Minister for Skills, Research and Innovation Damien English announced that Lero had been selected as one of five new world class SFI Research Centres in Ireland as part of a Government and industry funding programme worth €245m. As a result of this new remit, we will broaden our research scope from purely software engineering to a wider range of software disciplines. This will add more researchers from UL, UCD, NUIG, DCU and TCD. We will combine core software research with targeted projects in areas of national importance closely aligned to industry and enterprise needs, job opportunities and societal goals. With the addition of researchers from UCC and NUI Maynooth, Lero now combines the top software research talents across all of the country’s universities plus Dundalk IT. This level of research collaboration across the third level sector is we believe unique in the world. As a result, it can only help to enhance Ireland’s reputation as a key global
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centre for the establishment of multinational and indigenous software companies. Our expanded role has important implications for Ireland Inc. Software is at the heart of a modern global economy. Software-based systems are growing and being deployed on an increasingly wide scale. Smart vehicles, smart cities and smart grids are all examples. These so-called cyber-physicalsocial systems (CPSSs) involve computers and networks (cyber), physical devices and sensors (physical) and users of services (social). They are made possible by technology trends such as the “Internet of Things”, mobile computing, cloud computing, and Software as a Service (SaaS) – all areas in which Lero is active.
participate in and contribute to international conferences. During 2014, our researchers had 160 publications including journal articles, conference papers and book chapters. In addition, we filed 3 patent applications, to add to our existing portfolio of 22 patents. Globally, companies developing software are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit skilled software engineers, while at the same time many current developers have little formal software engineering education and do not make best use of the latest processes and methods to ensure high quality software that meets the needs of users.
We are one of the infrastructural reasons why nine out of the ten top software companies in the world are located in Ireland. At the same time, we are playing a role as an important resource for Ireland’s growing indigenous software sector.
As a small nation, Ireland cannot produce the number of graduates that are needed to resolve the lack of qualified professionals. What we can and are doing is to produce truly high quality graduates with training and expertise in state-of-the-art techniques in software engineering and software development with top class research skills.
Lero’s global reputation is reflected in the number of invitations we receive to
To date, Lero has produced 47 PhD graduates that are in high demand and currently
Lero has been selected as one of five new world class SFI Research Centres in Ireland as part of a Government and industry funding programme worth â‚Ź245m.
we have another 65 on our books. This is in addition to the many undergraduate and Master’s students that Lero academics work with on a regular basis. Our graduates are transferring the skills and knowledge acquired through Lero research into industry in Ireland, helping it to compete on an international stage. It is also vital that we stimulate interest and skills at earlier stages in the education of our future professionals. The Scratch competition, started and sponsored by Lero and now run by the Irish Computer Society, has been a phenomenal success with the 2014 competition attracting
960 entries from 165 schools. It is instilling interest in computer programming in the next generation of students including an increasing number of girls. Lero was the only Irish winner of an international RISE award from Google, which in 2015 will be used to encourage more teenage girls to consider computing as a career option. I would like to pay tribute to our staff, to industry partner researchers and sponsors and to the Universities who support our research, particularly UL, our host institution. Of course, our research would be impossible without the funding we receive
from SFI, from other Irish agencies and from European public sources as well as our industry backers. We have entered a fascinating era for software. While technology has been accused in the past of overhyping, there is no doubt that developments across smart technologies, internet, mobile and cloud are game changers. Lero aims to be at the heart of that.
Prof Mike Hinchey, Director, Lero – the Irish Software Research Centre
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Executive Committee Prof Mike Hinchey is Director of Lero and Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Limerick. Prof Hinchey was previously Director of the Software Engineering Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. He remains as a consultant to NASA. His work with NASA was implemented in various space projects and will be incorporated in future missions. Particular areas of software research for Prof Hinchey include Formal Methods, Autonomous Systems and Software Reliability.
Lero Director Prof Mike Hinchey
Prof Brian Fitzgerald is the Chief Scientist at Lero. He holds an endowed professorship, the Frederick A Krehbiel II Chair in Innovation in Global Business & Technology, at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he was also Vice President Research from 2008-2011. He is Co-Principal Investigator in Lero and was Founding Director of the Lero Graduate School in Software Engineering. His research interests lie primarily in software development, encompassing development methods, global software development, agile methods and open source software.
Lero Chief Scientist Prof Brian Fitzgerald
Prof Bashar Nuseibeh is Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Limerick and was Chief Scientist at Lero until October 2012. He was also Director of Research in Computing at The Open University (OU), where he continues to supervise students and assist with research direction. His research interests are in software requirements and design, security and privacy, process modelling and technology, and technology transfer.
Co-Principal Investigator Prof Bashar Nuseibeh
Prof John Murphy is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Informatics at University College Dublin and a Lero Co-Principal Investigator. He is an IBM Faculty Fellow, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow and Chartered Engineer with Engineers Ireland, and a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society. His research interests are in performance engineering, telecommunication systems, enterprise software, middleware, mobile networks and queueing theory.
Co-Principal Investigator Prof John Murphy
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Dr Fergal Mc Caffery is a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Principal Investigator and Senior Lecturer. He is Director of the Regulated Software Research Group in Dundalk Institute of Technology and the Medical Device Software Engineering competency area in Lero. His current research interests include the development of a software development framework for the medical device industry, software process improvement frameworks and assessments, and global software development.
Funded Investigator Dr Fergal Mc Caffery
Prof Kieran Conboy is an Associate Professor and Dean of the College of Business, Public Policy and Law at NUI Galway, Ireland. His research focuses on contemporary software project management methods such as lean and agile. Kieran is a Lero CoPrincipal Investigator and leads a research team of 15 PhD, postdoctoral, academic and industry staff. His research has been published in various conferences and journals such as the Information Systems Journal, the Journal of the AIS and IEEE Software.
Funded Investigator Prof Kieran Conboy
Prof Tiziana Margaria received a Laurea in Electrical Engineering and a PhD degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. She has broad experience in the use of formal methods for high assurance systems. Her current research focuses on advanced service engineering techniques supporting reliability and compliance through a model-driven version of service-oriented development called xMDD (eXtreme Model Driven Design) and the embedding of selected formal methods in the development platform.
Co-Principal Investigator Prof Tiziana Margaria
Prof Matthew Hennessy is a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Professor in Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin. His general research area is the Foundations of Computation, with particular interest in the semantics of concurrent and distributed systems. Current research aims at providing sound specification techniques and verification technologies for assuring the correct behaviour of highly distributed systems. His research has attracted significant funding from a variety of EU research programmes and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Co-Principal Investigator Prof Matthew Hennessy
Prof Joao Marques-Silva is currently Stokes Professor of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin (UCD and is affiliated with IST/INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal. Joao Marques-Silva received his PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, in 1995. His current research interests include decision and function procedures, using SAT, QBF and SMT, analysis of over-constrained systems, applied formal methods, applications in software engineering, including model checking, testing, debugging and security, and applications in artificial intelligence, operations research, design automation and bioinformatics.
Co-Principal Investigator Prof Joao Marques-Silva
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Prof Gregory Provan received his BSE from Princeton University, USA, his MSc from Stanford University, USA, and his DPhil from University of Oxford, UK. He is currently Director of the Complex Systems Lab (http://www.cs.ucc.ie/ccsl/) at UCC. Prior to joining UCC he was on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, and spent over 10 years in industrial research. His interests are in complex systems (design, analysis and control), diagnostics, algorithm design, and bioinformatics. His current research focuses on modelling and analysis of sustainable energy systems, and co-design of embedded systems.
Co-Principal Investigator Prof Gregory Provan
Dr Claus Pahl a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing at Dublin City University. He is also the Lead Principal Investigator in the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce (IC4) and an Investigator at the ADAPT digital content research centre. His main area of research interest is Cloud and Service Systems Architecture. He has published more than 250 papers, has a h-index of 27. Claus has received more than 5 million Euros in direct funding and supervised ten research students to completion at Dublin City University.
Funded Investigator Dr Claus Pahl
Prof Brian Donnellan is Professor of Information Systems Innovation at Maynooth University (www.nuim.ie) and is Academic Director of the Innovation Value Institute (www.ivi.ie). He has degrees in Engineering (B.Eng), Business (MBA) and Information Systems (PhD). He spent 20 years working in the ICT industry where he was responsible for the provision of Engineering Information Systems to support New Product Development. He is an expert evaluator for the European Commission and has been guest and associate editor of several leading IS journals including Journal of IT, Journal of Strategic Information Systems and MIS Quarterly. He has published over 150 papers and articles in IS journals and conferences.
Funded Investigator Prof Brian Donnellan
Brendan O’Malley is General Manager of Lero, responsible for all the non-academic aspects of the Centre’s work. He heads up a central team that manages operations, facilities, outreach, contracts and reporting, as well as the process of bidding for research funding in conjunction with industry and academic partners.
General Manager Mr Brendan O’Malley
Susan Mitchell is the Operations Manager of Lero since its inception in 2005. She is responsible for overseeing all aspects of Lero operations including administration, finance, staffing, the development and day to day running of the Centre.
Operations Manager Susan Mitchell
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Our graduates are transferring the skills and knowledge acquired through Lero research into industry in Ireland, helping it to compete on an international stage.
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Lero’s Vision & Mission To establish Ireland as a location synonymous with high quality software development through advanced research and smart collaboration with industry partners, national agencies, other research centres, and our broad outreach programme.
Lero seeks to foster a software ecosystem in Ireland that can create wealth and jobs. This ecosystem will evolve to achieve international recognition and acknowledgement, on a similar trajectory to Silicon Valley or Boston’s Route 128.
(L to R) Dr Mary Shire, Vice President Research UL, EU Commissioner Ms Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, Professor Mike Hinchey, Director of Lero 8
Lero’s Strategic Objectives 1
RESEARCH
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INDUSTRY
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Advance the State-of-the-Art in Software Engineering
Work with industry partners to identify & solve industry problems and to generate new SW-based products & services
EDUCATION
Attract & educate the software developers of the future
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Lero Research Lero’s research focus is on Evolving Critical Systems
Lero’s research focus is on Evolving Critical Systems (ECS). These systems change over time (“evolving”), are strategically important to their users or owners (“critical”), and are often significantly – although not necessarily exclusively – software intensive (“systems”). ECS increasingly characterises a large proportion of software systems in development and use today, from business-critical systems (such as airline websites), to safety-critical systems (such as an automotive braking control system), to product critical systems (such
as the core modules of a large software product). All such systems must exhibit predictability and reliability, while operating in environments that demand flexibility in face of long term evolutionary changes and more immediate and dynamic adaptation needs. Our research in Lero addresses this dichotomy by investigating engineering approaches for developing software that is flexible and reliable, in both its construction and its use. In a world that is increasingly populated with software intensive technologies,
Lero offers a uniquely holistic research treatment of software throughout its lifetime. The historical boundary between design-time and run-time research in software engineering is blurring due to increased dynamic adaptation. Lero’s research programme envisages that future software engineering techniques will operate seamlessly throughout design- and run-time. Lero has considerable expertise in both design-time and run-time research as demonstrated in Lero’s four research Hub Areas.
Systems must exhibit predictability and reliability, while operating in environments that demand flexibility
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Lero’s four research Hub Areas A
Methods & Standards for High Integrity Systems is largely concerned with design-time.
B
Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
C
Software Performance
D
Security and Privacy
has a large focus on run-time adaptation.
is concerned with both design-time and run-time issues.
is concerned with both design-time and run-time issues.
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Software that is Reliable, Secure & Efficient
Hub A Methods & Standards For High Integrity Systems
The development of software that is reliable, secure and efficient has been identified as a significant on-going challenge by the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology (2012). Led by Lero Chief Scientist Prof Brian Fitzgerald, research is carried out on formal methods, model-driven development and agile methods in a variety of contexts including medical devices, financial software development and global software development.
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MDevSpice® Spinout Medical devices are universally used in our software savvy world and are often taken for granted. These devices are regularly used for measuring and monitoring data in combination with display or representation of the data on a mobile computing device, typically a smart-phone or a tablet. Medical devices such as pacemakers have greatly improved the quality of life for millions of people and most have them fitted and think no more about it. However, many of these devices are underpinned by complex software.
with a product development. Once launched MDevSpice®’s new service will make life a lot easier for manufacturers to develop new products.
MDevSpice® is a soon to be spin-out based at DkIT. The cofounders are Dr Fergal McCaffrey, Dr Paul Clarke and Dr Marion Lepmets. They have developed a framework which has been designed to enable best practice adoption and assessment in medical device software development. It integrates accumulated practices from generic software engineering with medical device software standards into one single framework. Until recently both SME’s and multi-nationals had to wade through masses of different rules, regulations and standards before they could proceed
“In recent years over 20 per cent of medical device recalls in the US were related to software, and this number is growing. Our innovative framework centralises all of the software-centric knowledge in a one-stop shop. It facilitates manufacturers striving for best practice and in turn this will increase the safety of devices while also reducing the risk of potentially embarrassing and costly product recalls. Through our engagement with industrial groups it became apparent that although excellent standards and guidance documents exist to assist manufacturers, when it came to software
Dr Paul Clarke explains that “We have been conducting research in this area for many years and often take the lead in the development of new international standards through our work with the International Organisation for Standardisation and the International Electrotechnical Commission,” Clarke says.
development, these sources were of varied origin and focus. With the proportion of medicaldevice recalls attributable to software errors on the rise [10 per cent in the early 1990s to 20-25 per cent today] there was a real need for standards consolidation. Apart from the cost of a recall, medical-device manufacturers can also struggle to recover from the damage it can cause to their brand.” MDevSpice® has received financial support from Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland along with some EU funding which has allowed it to become commercially ready to launch its service. It has taken about five years to get to this point and now only final details remain before the service is available. MDevSpice® will employ the founders but will also create new jobs and may, in the future, look for a Chief Executive to look after the dayto-day running of the company. For now MDevSpice® is delighted that the future is so promising with customers already eagerly waiting for the service to become available.
(L to R) Dr Paul Clarke, Peter Donnelly, Dr Marion Lepmets and Dr Fergal McCaffrey
MDevSpice® innovative framework centralises all of the software-centric knowledge in a one-stop shop. 13
Making An Impact
Lero’s Team Developing Solutions Ensuring ‘App’-ropriate Care
Making Medical Software Safer
The number of Health related Apps available in 2014 was reported to be 100,000. There are many difficulties which deter the development of Mobile Medical Apps (MMP’s) including the communication of and vagueness surrounding the regulatory status of MMP’s, time and cost constraints, safety issues along with security and privacy issues. Dr Fergal McCaffrey works with the FDA and European medical regulators on processes to ensure that mobile app developers guarantee patient safety.
Software is everywhere in the clinical environment. We use and trust many medical devices and there is a legal requirement for these devices to be certified. Dr Ita Richardson is working with the HSE and several healthcare companies to help them understand how to implement and use clinical software and medical devices, while taking patient needs and legislation into account.
Becoming Part of the Crowd! Large Scale Software Solutions Prof Kieran Conboy is working with Ericsson and Information Mosaic to study workflows in the software development process, identifying the new techniques needed to manage large-scale, continuously evolving software systems. The need for evolution is driven by the fact that software intensive systems have to be continuously evolved otherwise they would lose their value or become obsolete.
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The Global Software landscape has changed dramatically with the development of Software Ecosystems. Software development no longer takes place in isolation, but in a complex network of various stakeholders, such as keystone companies, third-party app developers and customers who can compose a solution consisting of the various building blocks. Prof Brian Fitzgerald is exploring new ecosystems (e.g. crowdsourcing, inner source) to codify practices to make them more accessible to the business community.
Self-Configuration Self-Optimisation Self-Protection Self-Healing
Hub B Autonomous & Adaptive Systems
Increasingly, systems are required to accommodate changes while remaining continuously available. Led by Prof Mike Hinchey, formerly Director of NASA’s software engineering laboratory, this hub addresses run-time adaptation techniques that allow a system to react to potentially unforeseen changes in its environment. Adaptive systems offer the possibility of greater automation and utilisation of resources via the so-called “self-* properties” such as self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimisation and self-protection, and are increasingly important to deliver the Internet of Things concept. 15
Autonomy Requirements Engineering As part of a project with the European Space Agency (ESA) Dr Emil Vassev and Prof Mike Hinchey are currently working on the development of autonomous systems in space exploration missions. These autonomous systems will enable spacecraft to adapt to unforeseen situations making them more resilient and able to self-adapt, self-repair and become more fit-for-purpose. BepiColombo is an ESA mission to Mercury. BepiColombo will perform a series of scientific experiments, tests and measures. For example, it will make a complete map of Mercury at different wave lengths. Such a map will chart the planet’s mineralogy and composition of elements. Other experiments will determine whether the interior of the planet is molten or not, and investigate the extent and origin of Mercury’s magnetic field. Mike and Emil’s research in autonomous systems will enable the Bepicolombo spacecraft to self-adapt becoming more
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robust and able to spend longer in space without having to return for repairs thus completing the mission successfully. Traditionally, requirements engineering is concerned with what a system should do and the constraints under which it must do it. Alongside traditional requirements engineering, requirements engineering for autonomous and self-adaptive systems (e.g., exploration robots, drones, autonomous cars, etc.) must address issues related to adaptation. In particular, what adaptations are possible, under what constraints and how those adaptations are to be implemented. Adaptations arise when a system needs to cope with changes in its operating environment in order to ensure that system’s objectives are achieved. Mike and Emil’s research with the European Space Agency (ESA), has developed the Autonomy Requirements Engineering (ARE) approach to developing these
types of systems. ARE converts adaptation issues into autonomy requirements where a technique known as Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is used along with a model for Generic Autonomy Requirements (GAR). ARE was applied to a proofof-concept case study, to capture autonomy requirements of ESA’s BepiColombo Mission to Mercury, scheduled for launch in 2015. By applying GORE, they have built goals models that subsequently helped them derive and organize the autonomy requirements for BepiColombo. They did this by defining the objectives of the mission that must be achieved in the system’s operational environment (space, Mercury, proximity to the Sun, etc.), and by identifying the problems that exist in this environment. Their research in autonomous systems will not only benefit future space missions but also exploration robots, drones and autonomous cars.
Making an impact
Lero’s team developing solutions
Space Autonomy
Lightening the Load
Prof Mike Hinchey is working with the European Space Agency to develop new ways of defining autonomous behaviour in spacecraft. Future Missions will exploit new paradigms for space exploration, heavily focused on the emerging technologies of autonomous and autonomic systems. Traditional missions, reliant on the one large spacecraft are being superseded or complemented by missions that involve several smaller spacecraft operating in collaboration, analogous to swarms in nature. This means that spacecraft will be able to travel for longer and so explore further with reduced costs and risks.
Dr Andrew Butterfield is working with the European Space agency and aerospace contractors such as SciSys on new ultra-robust computer architectures for spacecraft payloads. Space missions have to be developed within financial constraints. Cost is a key system design parameter. Cost engineering is an essential part of systems engineering. Dr Butterfield’s work will allow space craft to carry even more equipment therefore increasing investigative capacity by making equipment lighter.
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Monitoring, Testing, Migration & Integration
Hub C Software Performance
Cloud-based applications and other large-scale systems generate huge streams of monitoring data. These streams need to be processed in real time in order to detect precursor signs of performance degradation and trigger appropriate remedial actions. Led by Prof John Murphy, this hub provides approaches to improve the performance and reliability of Cloud applications, through monitoring, testing, migration, and integration. This research also focuses on design and performance of parallel processor architectures, to maximise performance while minimising power consumption especially relevant in data centres, for example. 18
Bridging the Software Architectural Gap
Software applications are becoming increasingly large and complex. For example, some dated reports of Mac Office state that it contains 30,000,000 lines of code. Windows XP was reported as consisting of 45,000,000! Considering that there are 40 lines of text on an average book-page, that means that Mac Office is a 750,000 page epic while XP comes in at a block-busting 1,125,000 pages. To make matters worse, these lines of code are not quite as palatable as the English lines of text you will find in most novels. They contain a huge number of inter-dependencies that even an Umberto Eco enthusiast would find impossible to retain. And yet these systems must still be effectively managed as a whole across their initial development and subsequent
evolution. For example, given the scale, different parts of a system may be farmed out to different sub-teams of developers and these parts must work together when re-integrated. Likewise the development team must ensure that all parts of the resultant system perform at an acceptable speed for the user, even when crunching large data sets. Other system-wide concerns include security, configurability (for each customer) and maintainability. These are typically the concerns of software architects: members of the development team who’s core job is to structure the system to maximize its ability to meet these system-wide concerns. But even if the architect does manage to define the appropriate architecture for their software system, it may not be realized in the implementation. This can
be for a multitude of reasons: implementation is concerned with micro-detailed specification (programming) of how to achieve the system’s functionality, and developers may be unable to keep the architect’s macro-level perspective in mind; larger development team may not be fully aware of all the subtleties of the architecture, particularly as new developers come onboard; and the developers may be aware of the architecture but are under time-to-market pressures that make them deviate in their implementation; Whatever the reason, the resultant inconsistency between the intended architecture and the implemented architecture means that the criteria that the architect was trying to embody in the system may not be fully addressed.
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Dr Jim Buckley leads an Architecture Recovery and Consistency (ARC) team in Lero that endeavours to raise consistency between the intended and designed architecture. As part of this effort, Dr Jacek Rosik (a Post-doctorate researcher on the team) has created a tool (JITTAC) that provides developers with real time information on the location of inconsistencies between the intended architecture and the implemented architecture. It does this by allowing developers build a nodes-and-edges diagram of the architecture of their system. The architect can then map pieces of the existing source code to the nodes in the diagram. The tool then analyses this source code and detects dependencies between code that has been mapped to different nodes. Thus it is able to update the diagram, reinforcing locations where these dependency-edges reflect the architect’s expected edges, but also highlighting where the dependency-edges don’t reflect the architect’s expectations.
The result is a diagram that allows architects identify where developers have drifted from their intended architecture. The tool allows them to navigate to the lines of code responsible and assess the inconsistency more fully. The approach has been trialled in a number of companies including IBM, QAD Ireland and several Irish-based Financial Services companies. In each case the approach identified several violations that surprised the architect involved and led to further exploration. Interestingly, in many cases these led to changes in the architectural model rather than the code itself. This happened when the ‘violation’ was deeply embedded in the code base and the effort required to remove it was deemed excessive with respect to the value such a removal would have. To address this violation-embedding issue, JITTAC now provides real-time violation-introduction information to software developers as they code: that is, if a developer inserts
a violation while coding, they get informed of it immediately. In other cases the architectural model changed because the ‘violation’ actually added value in a way that the original architect did not anticipate. Here insights obtained during development implied a refined architecture that the architect was happy to accept. Consequently this area, traditionally referred to as ‘architecture conformance’ is probably better referred to as ‘architecture consistency’. In other instances, the source code was changed, resulting in a more consistent embedding of the architecture, and the architectural concerns, over the system. The effects of this work are significant: architectural issues of concern are better reflected in the implementation or, when they are not, the team is more aware of the issues. In addition developer insight-led changes to the architecture are now made explicit and the resultant system is easier to maintain going forward.
JITTAC is a tool that allows architects identify where developers have drifted from their intended architecture. The tool allows them to navigate to the lines of code responsible and assess the inconsistency more fully. 20
Making an impact Lero’s team developing solutions Improving Software Test Processes
Leaving the Legacy Behind Dr Jim Buckley and Dr Goetz Botterweck are working on ways to transform old legacy code by extracting features one at a time and converting them. There is a lot of old software out there which is still at the heart of many critical applications particularly in the area of financial transactions. For example, more than 50 years after the COBOL language was invented the fact is that there are 200 times more COBOL transactions daily than Google searches. Lero’s software modernisation work focuses mainly on two areas: Re-positioning software into service-oriented architectures and offering firms facilities to ensure that the software they create adheres to the original design.
Prof John Murphy’s team at UCD view a user request to a web server as a “transaction” made up of a series of software functions that require a certain amount of processing time and memory access time. By modelling software systems from this perspective, they have developed the concept of “transaction profiles” to quickly identify when a new release of the software system has some functions that perform worse than in the previous release – known as a performance regression. This work, done in collaboration with IBM’s Dublin Software Lab, can significantly reduce the testing time before releasing a new software version and is attracting attention from the performance engineering community.
Testing the Cloud Cloud computing is essential to the software industry, but testing the Cloud or the applications deployed in the Cloud is extremely difficult given the complexity and size of this intricate collection of interconnected computers and services. Software quality assurance has to be reinvented, to reflect the fact that comprehensive upfront testing is not usually feasible anymore. Prof John Murphy and his team at UCD have pioneered the field of testing the Cloud through the organization of scientific and industrial events where they gathered world leaders on this topic from academia and major players in the Cloud market such as Microsoft, Google, SAP, IBM and HP Their work will impact on how large-scale systems should be tested and what tools can be used for testing, and will apply to all Cloud infrastructures such as data centres and networks.”
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Security-By-Design, Adaptive Security, & Forensic Analysis
Hub D Security & Privacy
Due to the proliferation of pervasive and highly critical software, techniques to engineer secure software are urgently needed. Led by Prof Bashar Nuseibeh, European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant recipient, this hub will combine security-bydesign, adaptive security, and forensic analysis in an engineering framework to support the development of dynamic access control systems, verification of security and privacy compliance for complex systems, and forensic analysis of systems implicated in security breaches and cybercrime. 22
Cracking Cybercrime With software-intensive systems becoming more pervasive, an increasing number of assets, which are transmitted, manipulated, or stored digitally, are being compromised by cybercrimes. To identify and prosecute those responsible for such crimes, a digital forensic investigation aims to collect, analyse and present digital evidence necessary to demonstrate how a digital crime was committed, what harm was done, and who was responsible. Although exiting tools, such Sleuthkit and Encase, can be used to extract digital forensic evidence, investigators still have to approach each crime case from scratch, by postulating potential hypotheses and manually analysing large volumes of data. Traditional digital investigations assume access to and control of IT assets - such as storage - during an investigation, but this may not be the case if the
system uses volatile storage or a virtualized infrastructure. In Lero’s ManSec project Dr Liliana Pasquale and Prof Bashar Nuseibeh have been working with IBM Software Labs to develop a framework to support forensic readiness. This framework is based on the design of potential speculative hypotheses of a crime in advance. To preserve necessary – but volatile – evidence generated by volatile sources, such evidence may be collected proactively depending on the likelihood of a crime taking place. If an investigation starts, the evidence already collected is analysed to assess if some of the speculative hypotheses of a crime hold and what further evidence is necessary to support them. The likelihood of each hypothesis is estimated depending on the state of data collected. For each hypothesis that is satisfied, a case is generated, in the form of a structured
argument, to demonstrate how the evidence collected supports that hypothesis. Preliminary results are promising. We are developing an open source toolset to support proactive digital investigations in large distributed systems, which we are using to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in Cloud computing environments. Dr Liliana Pasquale also received a Microsoft Windows Azure Research Award entitled “Minority Report: Using the Cloud to Enable Proactive Digital Forensic Investigations”. This award will enable the Lero team to investigate performance enhancement to our framework through the use of software parallelisation techniques. Our aim is to continue evaluating the feasibility of proactive analysis for large systems and to contribute to the development of substantive systems that are forensics-ready.
Lero have been working with IBM Software Labs to develop a framework to support forensic readiness.
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Making an impact
Lero’s team developing solutions
Trespassers will be prosecuted – Private Property! Prof Bashar Nuseibeh is working on new ways for app users to determine who has access to personal and private data. Prof Nuseibeh suggests that most users use default privacy settings, which may lead to information being shared to unintended members of social network groups regardless of their variable risk profiles. “Even more privacy aware users may still make wrong sharing decisions due to a lack of information about privacy threats and the consequences of sharing. Our research has the potential to benefit not only individual users who want to protect their privacy, but also the online social network providers themselves who may need to respond more effectively to user concerns or future regulatory requirements.”
Digital Forensics battle against Cybercrime Dr Pavel Gladyshev’s work focuses on the logical foundations of digital forensic analysis and its applications to investigations of cybercrimes. His work encompasses the recovery and investigation of material found in digital devices, often in relation to computer crime. He is currently working with law enforcement agencies and private firms on digital forensics which help to track down evidence of cybercrime. The role that digital forensic evidence has played in recent murder investigations is of enormous public importance.
Safer Security Dr Liliana Pasquale is working with United Technologies on model-based approaches to designing adaptive security policies to makes assets more secure. It will accommodate the emergence of multiple perimeters and moving parts on the network, and increasingly advanced threats targeting enterprises. Adaptive security can watch a network for malicious traffic and behavioral anomalies, ferret out end point vulnerabilities, identify real-time changes to systems and automatically enforce end point protections and access rules.
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Industry Partnership Lero’s research is firmly connected to the real world. Without the involvement of our industry partners, we wouldn’t have the same insights into the evolving challenges of the software engineering community or the opportunity to test our ideas in live business and industry environments. We were delighted to have the support of 29 companies for our new SFI Research Centre proposal and look forward to working with them and with others that join us in the coming years. Our industry partners are very diverse, coming from a range of sectors: telecommunications, financial services, medical devices, computer systems and natural resources. Some are large multinationals and some are small SMEs and we work with their people in many countries around the world. The Research Centre budget (2015 – 2020) of
€ 41 Million includes contributions from our industry partners of €13.7 Million. In 2014, we worked with approximately 40 companies in a wide range of projects funded by Irish funding agencies (SFI, Enterprise Ireland, the Irish Research Council), by European agencies (European Commission FP7, the European Space Agency) and directly by industry partners themselves. There are many ways in which companies work with Lero, supported by a wide range of Irish and international funding programmes. Whether we are dealing with a major research challenge being addressed by an international team of collaborators or a smaller challenge being faced by a single company, Lero can bring the relevant expertise to bear.
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Lero’s research is firmly connected to the real world. Without the involvement of our industry partners, we wouldn’t have the same insights into the evolving challenges of the software engineering community or the opportunity to test our ideas in live business and industry environments.
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Collaborate to Innovate
Dr. Lorraine Morgan is a Senior Research Fellow with the Evolving Open Software Systems Group (EVOSS) within Lero at NUI Galway. This group works on the development and implementation of open innovation processes within organisations. As organisations face increasing global competition, shorter innovation cycles and dwindling resources, being able to implement open innovation practices and processes is crucial. Those firms that do engage in open innovation leverage external knowledge and ideas to accelerate and exploit innovation more effectively. One way in which organisations connect with external sources of knowledge is by participating in ecosystems with a multitude of external complementors, including customers, universities/research institutes and competitors. The EVOSS group has conducted much research around such
ecosystems and has worked with a number of firms from different sectors including healthcare, electronics, telecommunications etc. The research has found that firms that participate in ecosystems are presented with the opportunity to share costs, leverage different ideas for innovation, enhance their reputation, and attract complements and improvements to their existing products and services. Given the openness of the ecosystem, the power to innovate collectively and the ability to keep costs to a minimum, firms in turn can present a more attractive value proposition to their customers, e.g. lower prices or better solutions. There are, however, a number of challenges involved in participating in these types of open ecosystems. For example, formal and informal governance processes are important in overseeing network participation
and sustainability. The presence of formal safeguards and procedures result in new contributors to the network being less apprehensive about donating knowledge or sharing ideas, and basically alleviates any fears they may have about the possible opportunistic behaviour of others in the network. Lero researchers at NUI Galway continue to work and advise different organisations on the implementation of open innovation processes. In particular the group are committed to assisting organisations in the development of open business models that consider the importance of complementors in open ecosytems. Moreover, the group received a grant from the Irish Research Council in 2013 to investigate the implementation of crowdsourcing (another form of open innovation) strategies in public funded agencies.
Lero researchers at NUI Galway continue to work and advise different organisations on the implementation of open innovation processes 27
12 PhD students graduated in 2014 and 47 have graduated to date.
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There are currently
11 commercialisation related
€2m grants, worth over
160
PhD students in Lero
publications 39 journals, 2 books &
10 book chapters
in the past three years alone
in 2014
65 €
160
€2m
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IMPACTs & OUTPUTs
6 22 patents to date
15
15
24
awards in 2014
6
spin-out companies to date
24 workshops &
invited speakers hosted including 6 industry workshops hosted in 2014
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Software Survey Thousands of Irish software jobs could be forced overseas unless measures are taken to combat a skills and investment shortage, according to a new report published in 2014. The “Irish Software Landscape” study was conducted by Lero - the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre; the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick, and the Centre for Science, Technology & Innovation Policy at the University of Cambridge. “The companies surveyed have increased the numbers involved in software development by over 30% in the past three years. However, given the shortage of suitably skilled workers domestically, there is a danger that thousands of jobs could be created overseas rather than in Ireland,” commented Prof Brian Fitzgerald, Chief Scientist at Lero.
The report suggests that indigenous companies, which make up almost 80% of the total number of software firms in Ireland, have created employment faster than foreign/multinationals over the last three years. The indigenous firms which responded to this survey grew their softwarerelated employment by 39%, while multinationals grew theirs by 23%. Prof Fitzgerald added: “The Irish software industry has the potential to be one of the core engines of Irish economic growth, high income employment and exports but we need to address a number of critical issues including a skills shortage.” He said that a major barrier to growth is the availability of skilled technical staff. For indigenous firms, accessing personnel with appropriate sales and marketing expertise is also a major challenge.
“The challenge is particularly acute for our vital indigenous sector as graduates tend to be more attracted to multinational household names. Even amongst multinationals there is the danger of an ‘arms race’ whereby firms compete for top graduates, salaries are pushed up and, as a result, Ireland loses competitiveness.” He said that it was significant that after lack of availability of able technical employees, multinationals cited competition from low cost countries as the second most limiting factor for future growth. “This is a wake up call that competition from low cost countries reflects the fact that the software industry is truly a global one and Ireland cannot afford to be complacent.” The report finds that access to venture capital funding especially to second round, the vital growth stage, remains
Competition from low cost countries reflects the fact that the software industry is truly a global one 29
challenging for many indigenous software companies. “The study confirms that Ireland hosts a vibrant software industry with tremendous potential to be a global leader,” continued Prof Fitzgerald. “But the UK has now moved ahead of it in relation to incentivising investment and a number of Eastern European countries have eliminated income tax for software employees. Ireland needs to review its current investment and taxation policies to ensure that it does not lose out to more highly incentivised models in the UK, including N. Ireland, and Eastern Europe.” In noting how pervasive software and innovation are across all industry sectors, Dr Eoin O’Sullivan, Director of the Centre for Science, Technology & Innovation Policy at the University of Cambridge commented: “Our survey’s respondents included physical product manufacturers – notably ICT hardware, electronics and medical devices, but also firms
in emerging sectors such as green technologies and even traditionally less software-intensive sectors, such as food and agribusiness. In particular, the number of respondents which produce embedded software for devices or production technologies is worth noting given such software can be high value-adding and is likely to become ever more prevalent in high tech products and manufacturing systems.” Prof Helena Lenihan of the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick added that the shortage of suitably qualified Irish candidates has encouraged companies down the route of inward immigration. “Currently somewhere between 40% and 55% of jobs are filled in this manner. These immigrants make a major contribution to Ireland but more attractive tax jurisdictions may attract them home. It would be a real missed opportunity if the success of the Irish software industry had more
employment significance for Eastern Europe than for Ireland.” The report finds that the structure of the Irish software industry has changed. “The dominant business model is a blended products and services model, with the latter very much complementing the product business. This is a significant change from the all too common problem of the past where services were a way of earning revenue but a distraction from the main product business”. The survey also highlighted a number of key technology platforms of growing importance to driving the competitiveness of Irish-based firms, including cloud computing, data analytics and cyber-security. The report suggests that building Ireland into an internationally renowned global software centre may require understanding by policy makers that margin and sales growth are more important priorities to owners and investors than jobs.
The survey highlighted a number of key technology platforms of growing importance to driving the competitiveness of Irish-based firms, including cloud computing, data analytics and cyber-security. 30
Outreach As software pervades other industry sectors, more knowledge is needed to determine the specific challenges in these sectors. Lero has always been conscious of the need for translational research which effectively adapts basic research results to address significant practical challenges – seeking
research excellence with impact. That is, rather than seeing the publication of scientific research in leading international peer-reviewed journals as the sole goal, researchers also actively engage with industry to translate their research to solve practical problems.
Lero also offers a number of important knowledge transfer activities that create a unique value-add for software companies.
On-boarding Workshops
Primary and Post -Primary Education
on Emerging Software Research Topics
Getting the Basics Right
Third Level Education
Fourth Level Education
Ensuring the Supply of Graduates
Engineering Doctorates and Continuing Professional Development
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On-boarding Workshops The software field is one in which innovative concepts are constantly emerging, and companies have expressed the need for a mechanism to understand how such innovations might be leveraged. Lero achieves this through its on-boarding workshop series. These workshops focus on topics of particular interest to industry. The typical format is to
›› ›› ›› ›› ›› ›› ›› ››
have recognised experts in the area (from Lero, and often international experts also), complemented by industry experience reports, which afford useful networking opportunities. Senior management from over 150 different companies have participated at multiple workshops. The following are some recent workshops in the series:
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery: the Stairway to Heaven Software Quality for Medical Devices and Healthcare Security and Privacy in a Digital World Software Processes for Small/Start-up Companies Agile Methods in Regulated Environments Software Project Portfolio Management How Irish Software Companies can participate in Horizon 2020 Cloud Computing: What is on the Horizon?
Primary and Post-Primary Education – Getting the Basics Right One key initiative is the very successful Scratch Competition (www.scratch.ie) series, founded by Lero in 2010, targeting primary and post-primary level students. Since 2011, almost 1,200 teachers have participated in Scratch training (ranging from 10-20
hours). Lero has now partnered with the Irish Computer Society to run this program. Another coding initiative in which Lero members are prominent which seeks to promote software coding skills is Coder Dojo.
Third Level Education – Ensuring the Supply of Graduates The skills shortage that is apparent in the software sector worldwide is also a problematic issue in Ireland. About 40% of job vacancies are currently filled by inward immigration. At present, there is a significant overall attrition rate as student’s progress through their degree programs. This rate will be lowered due to the take-up of the Lero Scratch program, and the new Lero-designed programming module at second level, as these initiatives will ensure better-prepared students who understand what is involved in a software degree course before they choose it.
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However, to put this in perspective, India produces about 700,000 computing graduates per year. The clear message therefore is that it is not a brute-force numbers game; rather Ireland needs to be smart in its approach to computing education. To elaborate on this, certain software skills can be seen as job multipliers in the sense that these skills can underpin several additional supporting jobs. These roles include software architects, user interface designers, and Scrum masters. These skills are being systematically introduced into the graduate curriculum by Lero researchers.
Celebrate science promoting the relevance of science, technology, engineering and maths (stem) in our everyday lives. 33
Fourth Level Education The Lero Graduate School in Software Engineering (LGSSE), offers a structured PhD program with a single point of entry across all Lero partner institutions. Admission to the program is highly competitive, with an average of 160 applications per year from over 30 countries. Lero currently has 65 PhD students, with 47 PhD students having graduated since 2007, and almost 50% of these moving to positions in industry, some now at a very senior level. This level of transfer of PhD level graduates to industry is far greater than the average in other disciplines in Ireland where about 25% take up an industry position. Lero will expand its offering even further in this area by initiating an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) program, designed to facilitate people working in the software industry. Another educational initiative targeted at meeting industry needs and up-skilling the software workforce is the series of Continuing Professional Development courses in areas relevant to the software industry.
Human Capital Development If Ireland is to establish and maintain a global reputation for its software research, it is important to attract excellent human capital. One such initiative that Lero will establish is the Parnas Fellowship.
Parnas Fellowship Prof David L. Parnas, one of the founding fathers in the software engineering field, and also the Professor of Software Engineering at the UL until his retirement in 2008, has allowed Lero to establish the Parnas Fellowship scheme in his name. This is the first time that Prof Parnas has allowed his name to be used in this way. It is therefore a unique honour that he has agreed to do this for Lero. An endowment is being created to fund the brightest researchers to visit Lero for the Parnas Fellowship which will be a prestigious and much sought after position in the field.
To be exemplar in building partnerships that fund excellent ???science and drive it out into the market and society.
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Where are they now? Louise Reid Supervised by Dr Ita Richardson, Lero Principal Investigator and Dr John Burton an industry based Lero PhD Graduate.
There is a large increase in the use of software within hospitals with more and more technology leading to greater computerisation and use of data within the hospital domain. In some instances the technology and systems are being used effectively and providing direct benefits to the patient or to the organisation, in more cases the system outputs are not so good. Through working with Lero, I developed H-QAP, a hospital quality assurance program to address the problems identified with the management of software systems. The H-QAP program was intended to ensure that hospital software systems were being used both safely and effectively in order to realise their full potential. H-QAP has been helpful in achieving a favourable HIQA report in the UL hospitals where there was evidence of use in the Radiography Department, the Maternity Hospital and in Nenagh Hospital. It was also implemented in the elderly residential domain, leading to improvements in the care of residents in St. Camillus Hospital. H-QAP has recently been adopted by St. Ita’s Hospital and is being adapted for implementation there. Its use in the elderly residential unit has brought direct improvement to the quality of the lives of elderly people living locally.
Being involved with Lero changed both my perspective and outlook on the delivery of my work. It not only brought more evidence based best practice to my work within acute hospitals, the good practice has expanded to the Elderly Residential Domain with elderly residents benefiting directly from its implementation. Lero was a very friendly and supportive environment to work in, the team
Being involved with Lero changed both my perspective and outlook on the delivery of my work.
in Lero considered team working to be as important as evidence based research. Lero coffee is held on a Tuesday in the Tierney Building and I have brought that tradition to the department that I work in in the University Hospital. Staff in our department now meet for coffee on a Tuesday afternoon at 15:00. We work on different projects and this can be isolating, QPS coffee has strengthened the bonds between us, increased communication and improved working relationships. Members of the department have reported
that it has removed the sense of isolation that some members were feeling. People become more aware of the projects that others are involved with in an informal manner. They offer each other support and advice, ideas are generated and this assists people to get their projects over the line. I have also, through my involvement with Lero been afforded the opportunity of attending international conferences and I have brought the learning back to the local hospital. The most recent being a conference in Florida where I met with quality managers in the Veterans Hospitals, one of the largest hospital groups in the USA, and the Mayo Clinic which is considered to be the best hospital in the world. The value of hearing these people speak and to have the opportunity to speak to them afterwards cannot be overemphasised. It has upped my standards and I have set my goals far higher. I feel that my involvement with Lero has not only benefited me personally, it has also benefited the hospital and the broader community. This work was done part time in the hospital and funded through European Union TRANSFoRm project, DG INSFO (FP7 247787) and Science Foundation Ireland CSET grant to Lero (10/CE/I1855). 35
Dr Anthony Ventresque Has been awarded an SFI Industry Fellowship (05/2014-04/2016) to work in collaboration with IBM Research Lab in Dublin on performance improvement of Urban Mobility Simulation. This project is related to the fast and accurate simulation of what-if scenarios in the application area of Smarter Transportation.
Transport Mobility Simulation is a very computationally expensive process; however, applications of this technology require superfast solutions which are largely unavailable. This project will help to realise the goals of city traffic operators and urban planners who are interested in answering questions such as ‘what will be the impact on congestion levels in the next 30 minutes if we close this lane?’ or ‘would adding an additional lane to the M50 address Dublin’s transportation needs in the next few years?’. Recent reports, such as the Forfas Intelligent Infrastructure document (2011), states that investment in Ireland’s Intelligent Infrastructure will lead to job growth and improved competitiveness. In Ireland, traffic conditions have improved in some areas as a result of investment in expensive infrastructure modernisation, incentives to use public transport, car sharing and cycle to work schemes etc. For instance, in Dublin the number of car-only commuters decreased from 50% in 2000 to 34.6% in 2008. Further public transportation planning will greatly benefit from Intelligent Traffic Management systems that can analyse and simulate urban mobility, particularly in the case of unexpected events, e.g., weather catastrophes which can cause huge personal and economic pain to Irish citizens. This fellowship is a joint project with IBM Research Lab in Dublin, who is host to IBM’s
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only Smart Cities Technology Centre in the world.
engineering and intelligent transportation research.
The focus of the Transportation Analytics team at IBM Research - Ireland is the science behind analytics and optimization tools to plan, operate, and manage transportation systems and better understand mobility. This research then feeds into the IBM products such as the IBM Intelligent Operations Centre.
I have been happy to work closely with my supervisor and the head of the group in IBM and the course of my project has reflected some evolutions in the IBM transportation analytics team’s priorities and IBM globally: using the Cloud for traffic simulation and analysis. This has been a great opportunity to give my work more visibility in IBM research and strengthen my connections with members of the team.
This Fellowship will facilitate a new collaboration between the Transportation Analytics team at IBM Research and Lero. It will foster a synergetic alliance between Lero’s
This fellowship is a joint project with IBM Research Lab in Dublin, who is host to IBM’s only Smart Cities Technology Centre in the world. research in distributed traffic microscopic simulations and IBM’s world-class expertise in mobility dynamics modelling. Therefore, the Fellowship represents a unique opportunity for advances in software and performance engineering to have real impact on (i) Smarter Transportation products in one of the world’s leading ICT companies; and (ii) on the scientific community by fostering a multi-disciplinary collaboration between two distinct computer science disciplines – software
The Cloud is a very appealing paradigm for many of IBM’s customers as it facilitates adaptive infrastructure provisioning to variable objective/ needs of the decision makers, such as, cost of ownership and performance. However, the Cloud can be a challenging environment for computing intensive workloads as it is somehow less reliable than classical clusters and powerful servers. In this context, my team wanted to know whether it would be possible to move a feature as important as traffic prediction and in general transportation simulation into the Cloud. I have worked in collaboration with my supervisor and other researchers in Japan and Dublin on the topic, and have published two papers (CloudCom 2014, a top venue in the area, with only a 17% acceptance rate, and Euro-Par 2014) where I show that it is possible to run a distributed traffic simulation application on the Cloud.
IBC
Lero is a very friendly and supportive environment to work in, the team in Lero considered team working to be as important as evidence based research.
OBC