Prof. Wolfgang Emmerich

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Education

I hold a Diploma degree (comparable to a British MSc) in Computer Science from University of Dortmund, Germany and a Doctorate degree in Software Engineering from University of Paderborn, Germany.

Career

In October 2004, I was appointed to Professor of Distributed Computing in the Dept. of Computer Science at University College London. Prior to that, I was a Reader in Distributed Software Engineering in the Dept. of Computer Science at University College London. I am Head of the Software Systems Engineering Research Group and Director of Research of Computer Science at UCL. I am a member member of the UCL Grid Executive Board.

Before I joined UCL, I was a Lecturer in the Dept. of Computer Science at The City University, London. Before coming to England in February 1996, I was a visiting scholar in the Software Verification and Research Centre at the University of Queensland, Australia. I completed my PhD while I was a Research Assistant in the department of computer science at the University of Dortmund, Germany. I was a student assistant in the same department between 1987 and 1990.

Research

I am probably best known for my work on middleware-based distributed software architectures. Between 1997 and 2001, I have been invited to give tutorials on distributed object and component middleware at signficant international software enginering conferences. I have published papers on styles for distributed software architectures in the 1999,2000 and 2001 IEEE/ACM International Conferences on Software Engineering (ICSE), the most important software engineering meeting. I have given an invited talk on the software engineering challenges of using distributed objects and components at ICSE 2002. My more foundational work on reasoning about distributed object-based systems and conflict resolution in mobile systems has been published at the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) conferences in 2001 and 2002. At the IEEE Automated Software Engineering conference in 2001, I had a paper on consistency management of distributed software documents, which received the best paper award. I have published the foundations of that work in 2002 in ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and the most recent advances on repairing inconsistencies will be presented at ICSE 2003.

Collaboration

I currently have research funding in the amount of approx. GBP 1.5M on projects where I am the Principal Investigator. I am a co-investigator on a number of further projects. The projects funded by these grants are mostly of a collaborative nature. Within the software systems engineering group, I have enjoyed a long-standing collaboration with Anthony Finkelstein and Cecilia Mascolo. The language engineering effort for programmable networks is a collaboration with the Communications research group in UCL-CS and the Networks group in UCL-EE. I am responsible for the computing research on two e-science projects, funded by NERC and the EPSRC, which involve collaborations with UCL's Earth Sciences and Chemistry departments, as well as a number of further partners at the Royal Institution, Cambridge University, and the Universities of Bath and Reading. Internationally, I collaborate closely with a number of software engineering research groups in universities and research labs in EU funded projects. Moreover, I maintain collaborations with industrial research groups, including IBM Research in Hawthorn, USA, IBM UK in Hursley, UBS Warburg in London, Kodak Research in Harrow, BT exact Technologies at Adastral Park and the innovations group of Searchspace Ltd, a UCL spin-out.

Scholarly Service

I am an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. I have acted as guest editor for various issues of Automated Software Engineering and have served as reviewer for all main software engineering journals. I have served on the programme committee of all major software engineering conferences, including ICSE, ASE and FSE. I will co-chair the PC of the Int. Conference on Software Engineering with Gregg Rothermel in 2007. I have co-chaired the ASE PC with Dave Wile in 2002. I have been instrumental in establishing two specialist international research communities. The first one focuses on software engineering and middleware, which held peer-reviewed meetings in LA in 1999, Davis in 2000, Orlando in 2002 and Linz in 2004. The second community focuses on Component Deployment and has met in Berlin in 2002 and met and I co-chaired the Component Deployment PC for the meeting in Edinburgh in 2004 with Alex Wolf. I have been elected a member of the EPSRC College and have served as a reviewer for grant proposals to the Dutch Resource Council, the Australian Research Council and NSF.

Consultancy

I consider it very important for academic software engineering researchers to learn about the problems of the software industry. I have co-founded Zuehlke Engineering GmbH, Germany in 1998 and Zuhlke Engineering Ltd in London in 2001, where I am a director and part-time principal consultant. For Zuhlke, I author and deliver training courses, and consult on the engineering of distributed objects, mainly with banks and insurances.

Last Updated: July 2005
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