ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on
Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems

Keynote Talks

Steve Easterbrook (Wednesday morning, Sept 30)

During plenary session - 8:40 - 10:20 - Ballroom C

Modelling the Climate System: Is model-based science like model-based engineering?

His slides are now online on slideshare.

Modern computational science is largely a model-building activity. At first sight, the models that scientists construct seem to differ radically from those used in model-based engineering. Scientists tend to build indicative ('how things are') models of the world using sets of continuous equations, while engineers tend to build optative ('how things should be') models of the world using structural and procedural abstractions. But a closer look reveals many fascinating similarities. In this talk, I will explore the relationship between the two types of modelling, drawing on my field studies of how climate modellers work. I'll begin with an overview of what a climate model is and how it is used. I'll then dive deeper into the engineering challenges of constructing a climate model, including the challenges of coupling disparate model components, dealing with model versioning and model management issues, and the role that climate models play in enabling collaborative work. In the process, I hope to inspire people to explore how ideas from model-based software engineering might contribute to scientific modelling in general, and, more specifically, to the societal grand challenge of climate change.

Bio: Steve Easterbrook is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. (1991) in Computing from Imperial College in London (UK), and was a lecturer at the School of Cognitive and Computing Science, University of Sussex from 1990 to 1995. In 1995 he moved to the US to lead the research team at NASA's Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in West Virginia, where he investigated software verification on the Space Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, the Earth Observation System, and several planetary probes. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1999. His research interests range from modelling and analysis of complex adaptive systems to the socio-cognitive aspects of team interaction. His current research is in climate informatics, where he studies how climate scientists develop computational models to improve their understanding of earth systems and climate change, and the broader question of how that knowledge is shared with other communities.

Gail Murphy (Thursday morning, Oct 1)

During plenary session - 8:40 - 10:20 - Ballroom C

Software Supply Chains

Her slides are now online here or on slideshare.

It has long been desired to build software systems predominantly through the composition of existing software components. The need for such a production model is growing given the increasing use and reliance on software for almost everything we interact with from toasters to airplanes. For some kinds of systems, we have come a long way towards meeting the production via composition goal through the use of libraries, frameworks and plugin architectures. But, for other systems that require tight integrations of components produced by different suppliers, we are not yet able to reliably engineer a software supply chain. In this talk, I will outline some achievements in software supply chains and describe some of the challenges that need to be met to productively provide the systems of the future.

Bio: Gail C. Murphy is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. She is also co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Inc. Her research interests are in improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by giving them tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that really matters for their work.

Ramesh S (Friday morning, Oct 2)

During plenary session - 8:40 - 10:20 - Ballroom C

Automobile: Aircraft or Smartphone? - Modeling Challenges and Opportunities in Automotive Systems

His slides are now available on the website here.

Automotive systems are turning out to be one of the most complex consumer electronic systems being ever built. For the modern day users, they are products like smartphones and tablets but in size, complexity and quality and safety requirements they match if not exceed aircraft, and similar high integrity systems. Many of the major advances in Software engineering like model based development, platform based design and product line engineering have been introduced in the development of automotive electronic and software subsystems, which involve million lines of code and tens of electronic control units interconnected with multiple communication buses.

This talk will highlight the challenges, current practices and new developments in the industry in building next generation automotive software from the modeling and analysis perspective. The challenges include traditional issues like system integration and feature interaction arising out of the federated development model, heterogeneity in subsystem behavior, time and space distributed development of software and the recent and rapidly increasing demand for advanced driver assistance features and system level requirements like fault tolerance and security. The talk attempts to outline a set of requirements for modeling from the perspective of system design and analysis. The talk will also touch upon some of the research and developments efforts currently ongoing within and with our external partners to meet these challenges.

Bio: Ramesh S is a senior technical fellow at General Motors Global R&D, USA, and is responsible for providing technical leadership for research and development in several areas related to electronics, control and software processes, methods, and tools. He is an active industrial member of the Network for the Engineering of Complex Software-Intensive Systems for Automotive Systems (NECSIS), sponsored by the Automotive Partnership Canada. Earlier, he was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Bombay, for more than fifteen years. At IIT Bombay, he played a major role in setting up a National Centre for Formal Design and Verification of Software. His areas of interest are rigorous software engineering, embedded systems and real-time systems and he has published more than 100 papers in international journals and conferences. He has been on the editorial boards of the International Journal on Real-Time Systems and the Eurasip Journal on Embedded Systems, as well as earlier on the IEEE Embedded Systems Letters.