Seminar 2015-05-12; John Grundy on The Future of Software Engineering in Australia

Professor John Grundy is Dean of the School of Software and Electrical Engineering at Swinburne University of Technology. He is also Director of the Swinburne University Centre for Computing and Engineering Software Systems (SUCCESS). His teaching is mostly in the area of team projects, software requirements and design, software processes, distributed systems, and programming. His research areas include software tools and techniques, software architecture, model-driven software engineering, visual languages, software security engineering, service-based and component-based systems and user interfaces. John will be giving a talk on The Future of Software Engineering in Australia. In this talk John will outline what he considers to be key issues for software engineering research and practice in Australia. He will highlight some key example areas we are working in to address these in our research group.

Seminar 2015-05-01; Philipp Hoenisch on [Auto-Scaling²] - Optimizing Docker Placement on VMs

Lightweight containers, and most recently Docker containers, are getting more and more attention by developers and sysadmins. Similar to Virtual Machines (VMs), Docker provides an additional abstraction aiming at sharing underlying resources and libraries. Complex applications can be bundled and configured in images and then easily be deployed on any host. The big advantage of using Docker containers over VMs is the reduced system overhead as no additional operating system needs to be started. This enables hosting more independent applications on one single host. However, since computing resources (CPU, RAM, ...) are shared among the containers, a single container requiring too many resources may lead to unwanted side effects to other containers on the same host. Auto-scaling is now more complex as the research question becomes of how to place Docker containers on certain VMs under a given workload in order to prevent over- and under-provisioning. In his current work, Philipp addresses this topic by devising a two layer scaling approach using a multi-objective optimization model.

Seminar 2015-03-31; Mark Staples on Critical Rationalism and Engineering

How does engineering support assurances about the use of critical systems? Engineering often uses science, but is engineering "scientific"? What is engineering, and how should we create and develop engineering knowledge? Does any of that matter to software engineering or computer science? (And are they a kind of engineering or science anyway?) When thinking about such questions, it would be good to have a better idea about what engineering is. Philosophy of Science is a well-established field. However, until recently there has been little work on the Philosophy of Engineering. In this talk I provide an overview of two recent papers about the nature and growth of engineering knowledge. I first discuss definitions of engineering, and note three recurring elements: the use of theories to show that designed artefacts meet requirements. I discuss some misconceptions about engineering, and contrast engineering theories with scientific theories. I then describe an ontological framework I have proposed for engineering knowledge. This adapts Karl Popper's well-known philosophy of Critical Rationalism (falsification and all that) and his less well-known Three Worlds ontology. The framework provides a basis for a taxonomy of falsification in engineering (a.k.a. engineering failure), and a taxonomy of responses to falsification in the growth of engineering knowledge.

Seminar 2015-03-10

Jean-Baptiste Jeannin - CMU - gave a talk on Differential Temporal Dynamic Logic for Hybrid Systems and Airplane Collision Avoidance. In this talk, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin presents a new logic, the differential temporal dynamic logic dTL2, to express temporal properties about Cyber-Physical Systems. He then shows an application to airplane collision avoidance, with a verification of the next-generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System (ACASX), currently being developed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

CeBIT 2015
2015-03-05 Australia's leading technology & business expo is here in Sydney 5-7 May, 2015. 450 exhibitors from Australia and around the world – from startups to multinationals – showcase their innovations and technologies on the CeBIT Expo show floor. SSRG will be represented by Trustworthy Systems displaying the quadcopter and talking about HACMS/SMACCM.