Evolving Critical Systems

INVITED SPEAKER:

Mike Hinchey, Lero — the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland, mike.hinchey@lero.ie

Lecture title:
Evolving Critical Systems

Abstract: Increasingly software can be considered to be critical, due to the business or other functionality which it supports.  Upgrades or changes to such software are expensive and risky, primarily because the software has not been designed and built for ease of change. Expertise, tools and methodologies which support the design and implementation of software systems that evolve without risk (of failure or loss of quality) are essential. We address a research agenda for building software in computer-based systems that (a) is highly reliable and (b) retains this reliability as it evolves, either over time or at run-time and illustrate this with a complex example from the domain of space exploration.

Mike Hinchey is Director of Lero—the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, a national centre based at 6 Irish higher education institutes and funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under its Centres in Science, Engineering and Technology programme (CSET).  He is also Professor of Software Engineering at University of Limerick, Ireland.  Prior to joining Lero, Hinchey was Director of the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory based at Goddard Space Flight Centre and has previously been either Full or Visiting Professor in the USA, UK, Sweden, Australia and Japan.   Hinchey received a BSc in Computer Systems from University of Limerick, an MSc in Computation (Mathematics) from University of Oxford, UK, and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Cambridge, UK.    He is a Chartered Engineering, Chartered Mathematician and a Chartered Professional Engineering.  He is the Chair of IFIP Technical Committee 1 (Foundations of Computer Science) and is Chair of the IFIP Technical Assembly.