Nima Kaveh

Nima's research aims to assist designers of distributed object and component-based software architectures in detecting deadlocks, as well as violations of liveness and safety properties. Nima has defined a UML profile for distributed objects using UML extension mechanisms, defined the semantics of stereotypes and tagged values in terms of a mapping to a process algebra and is then able to use a model checker for the process algebra to detect design flaws.

Nima's research is partly self-funded and partly supported by the Software Systems Engineering group.

Key Publications:

• N. Kaveh and W. Emmerich (2003). Validating Distributed Object and Component Designs. In M. Bernardo and P. Inverardi (ed): Formal Methods for Software Architecture, pp. 63-91, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2804, Springer Verlag.
• N. Kaveh and W. Emmerich (2001). Deadlock Detection in Distributed Object Systems. In V. Gruhn (ed): Joint Proc. of the 8th European Software Engineering Conference and the 9th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Vienna, Austria, pp. 44-51, ACM Press.

Daniel Dui

Daniel is investigating the problem of engineering XML-based languages in a systematic way. The problem is motivated by the surge in number of XML languages, both standardised and languages that have been defined within an organisation. Daniel is investigating how the evolution of these languages can be managed in such a way that compatibility to previous language versions is maintained.

Daniel benefits from a generous studentship from UBS.

Key Publications:

• D. Dui and W. Emmerich (2003). Compatibility of XML Language Versions. In B. Westfechtel and A. v. d. Hoek (ed): Software Configuration Management. Selected Papers of ICSE Workshops SCM 2001 and SCM 2003, pp. 148-162, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2649, Springer Verlag.
• D. Dui and W. Emmerich and C. Nentwich and B. Thal (2003). Consistency Checking of Financial Derivative Transactions. In M. Aksit and M. Menzini and R. Unland (ed): Objects, Components, Architectures, Services and Applications for a Networked World, pp. 166-183, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2591, Springer Verlag.

Clovis Chapman

Clovis works on distributed resource allocation and scheduling in autonomous computational grids. Clovis has established the notion of overlay grids - multiple virtual organizations sharing the same computational resources. The research question that he is pursuing is how resource allocation and scheduling policies can be defined in the presence of overlay grids and how these policies can be enforced.

Clovis is a research assistant on the e-Minerals project funded by the National Environment Research Council and a part-time PhD student.

Key Publications:

• C. Chapman, P. Wilson, T. Tannenbaum, M. Farrellee, M. Livny, J. Brodholt and W. Emmerich (2004). Condor Services for the Global Grid: Interoperability between Condor and OGSA. In S. Cox (ed): Proc of the 2004 UK E-Science All Hands Meeting, Nottingham. pp. 870-877. UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council.
• C. Chapman, M. Musolesi, W. Emmerich and C. Mascolo (2007). Predictive Resource Scheduling in Computational Grids. In Proc. of the 21st Int. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, Long Beach, CA. pp. 1-10. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Andy Maule

Andy is working at the intersection between programming languages, databases and software engineering. The particular problem he is interested in is the impact that a change of a database schemas has on application programs that are written against that schema.

Andy's research is funded by a studentship from Microsoft Research.

• A. Maule, W. Emmerich and D. S. Rosenblum (2008). Impact Analysis of Database Schema Changes. In Proc. of the 30th Int. Conference on Software Engineering, Leipzig, Germany. ACM Press.

Torsten Ackemann

Torsten works on devising systematic ways for providing incentives to sharing resources in peer-to-peer and grid networks. He observed that current resource sharing is provided just on a voluntary basis in current peer-to-peer and grid systems. Monetary and virtual currency mechanisms are deemed too heavyweight and generally require a "central bank", which is incompatible with the philosophy of peer-to-peer networks. Torsten's hypothesis is that the overal quality of service will be improved if systematic bartering is facilitated. To achieve that peer-to-peer systems could detecting bartering rings and then provide improved quality of service to members of such bartering rings. Torsten's aim is to devise efficient and light-weight distributed algorithms to detect, maintain and exploit these bartering rings and then to show that they indeed provide an incentive to increase resource sharing in practice.

Torsten benefits from a PhD studentship from Kodak Research.

Bruno Wassermann

The overall aim of Bruno's PhD is to investigate techniques to increase the visibility of the system components relevant for the reliable execution of a given service composition and provide automated support to administrators during failure detection and diagnosis. The main aspect of the proposed contribution is a failure diagnosis mechanism, which extends existing approaches to problem determination and root cause localisation based on machine learning in several ways. Bruno aims to characterise certain quality attributes of the root cause localisation mechanism through a series of controlled experiments and then establish the effect of these attributes on the availability and time to repair on real systems in practice.

Bruno is funded through a BT/EPSRC Case Studentship.

Key Publications:

• B. Wassermann and W. Emmerich (2007). Reliable Scientific Service Compositions. In Workshop Proceedings of the 4th Int. Conf. on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2006), Chicago, IL. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 4652. pp. 14-25. Springer Verlag
• W. Emmerich, B. Butchart, L. Chen, B. Wassermann and S. L. Price (2005). Grid Service Orchestration using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Journal of Grid Computing, 3(3-4):283-304.