Software Engineering for High Assurance Systems

Organizers' Biographies

Martin Feather is a Principal in the Software Quality Assurance group at JPL. He works on developing research ideas and maturing them into practice, with particular interests in the areas of software validation (analysis, test automation, V&V techniques) and of early phase requirements engineering and risk management. He obtained his BA and MA degrees in mathematics and computer science from Cambridge University, England, and his PhD degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Prior to joining JPL, Dr. Feather worked on NSF- and DARPA-funded research while at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. He was program co-chair of the Automated Software Engineering Conference in 2001, and is now on the steering committee for the conference series. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Automated Software Engineering (Kluwer) and Requirements Engineering (Springer-Verlag). He is an active member of the International Federation for Information Processing's working group on Software Requirements Engineering, and has published widely in the software engineering milieu.

Constance Heitmeyer heads the Software Engineering Section of NRL's Center for High Assurance Computer Systems. She has led the development of NRL's SCR toolset, which has been widely distributed and applied to numerous high assurance systems. Her research interests are in software requirements, automatic test case generation, computer security, code synthesis, and real-time systems. Currently, she is applying formal techniques to three high assurance systems: NASA's fault protection engine, a safety-critical medical device, and a software-based cryptographic device. She has served as a co-organizer of the 1995 ONR/DARPA Workshop on High Assurance Systems, program co-chair of the 1996 IEEE Conference on Assured Computing (COMPASS), general chair of the 1997 IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, and co-chair of the 2002 Workshop on Requirements for High Assurance Systems. She serves on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and the Springer journals, Requirements Engineering and Software and Systems Modeling, and on the steering committees of IFIP Working Group 2.9, the International Conference on Requirements Engineering, and the CUE initiative on the scientific foundations of informatics as an engineering discipline.

Nancy Mead, a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Networked Systems Survivability Program of the SEI, leads the Survivable Systems Engineering team. She is also a faculty member in the Master of Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Mead is currently involved in the study of survivable systems requirements and architectures and the development of professional infrastructure for software engineers. Prior to joining the SEI, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Federal Systems, where she spent most of her career in development and management of large real-time systems. She also worked in IBM's software engineering technology area and managed IBM Federal Systems' software engineering education department. She has developed and taught numerous courses on software engineering topics, both at universities and in professional education courses. Dr. Mead was co-chair of the workshop on Requirements for High Assurance Systems, held in conjunction with RE '02 in September 2002. She has also served as conference chair of the International Conference on Requirements Engineering and the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training. She is currently Steering Committee Chair for the International Conference on Requirements Engineering.

Allen Nikora is a senior member of the technical staff in the Software Quality Group at JPL. He has received grants from the NASA IV&V Facility, JPL, and the U.S. Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center (AFOTEC) to investigate various aspects of software reliability estimation and fault modeling. He has presented papers at the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), the International Software Metrics Symposium, the Fault Tolerant Computing Symposium, the International Computer Software and Applications Conference, and the International Society of Science and Applied Technologies Conference on Reliability And Quality In Design. He is a member of the ISSRE Steering Committee, and served as general chair for ISSRE in 2000. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and belongs to the IEEE Computer and Reliability Societies.