Dr. James Skene

James' work was in the broad area of model driven architecture. He has devised a general approach for expressing non-functional properties of software architectures in UML profiles. He then devised a use of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) to systematically map these profiles to formalisms that are suitable for quantitative analysis of these architectures, including queuing networks, markov chains and stochastic process algebras.

James is now a Post Doc on the EPSRC Funded Divergent Grid project.

Key Publications:

• J. Skene and W. Emmerich (2004). Generating a Contract Checker for an SLA Language. In Proc. of the EDOC 2004 Workshop on Contract Architectures and Languages, Monterey, California. IEEE Computer Society Press.
• J. Skene, D. Lamanna and W. Emmerich (2004). Precise Service Level Agreements. In Proc. of the 26th Int. Conference on Software Engineering, Edinburgh, UK. pp. 179-188. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Dr. Rami Bahsoon

Rami investigated the problem of stability of software architectures, in particular to answer the question as to how much flexibility one needs to buy by investing into a software architecture. He took an economics-driven approach to the problem and has devised a real-option based approach that draws on Black/Scholes option pricing to solve the problem. He evaluated the approach by applying it to the problem of selecting between different middleware-based software architectures and was able to show that a Real Option approach delivers better guidance than traditional cost/benefit analysis techniques, such as discounted cash flow or net present value.

Rami is now a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham.

Key Publications:

• R. Bahsoon, W. Emmerich and J. Macke (2005). Using real options to select stable middleware-induced software architectures. IEE Proceedings Software, 152(4):167-186.
• R. Bahsoon and W. Emmerich (2004). Evaluating Architectural Stability with Real Options Theory. In Proc. of the 20th Int. Conference on Software Maintenance, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.. pp. 443-447. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Dr. Christian Nentwich

Christian investigated how to detect inconsistencies in distributed semi-structured data that he assumes can be translated into an XML markup. He has devised a first-order logic language that uses on XPaths to specify consistency rules and defined several execution semantics for that language. A first semantics creates XLinks in order to hyperlink those document fragments that cause an inconsistency. The second semantics generates all possible actions for repairing inconsistencies. The third semantics is used for test case generation and translates a set of consistency rules and a correct document into a set of all possible inconsistent documents.

Christian benefited from a UCL Graduate School scholarship and additional financial support from Zuhlke Engineering. Christian concluded his PhD research in January 2005.

Christian is now Strategy Director of Message Automation

Key Publications:

• C. Nentwich and W. Emmerich and A. Finkelstein (2003). Consistency Management with Repair Actions. In Proc. of the 25th Int. Conference on Software Engineering, Portland, Oregon, pp. 455-464, ACM Press.
• C. Nentwich and W. Emmerich and A. Finkelstein and E. Ellmer (2003). Flexible Consistency Checking. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methology, 12(1):28-63.

Dr. Licia Capra

Licia investigated middleware principles for mobile computing. She identified the need for mobile applications to react to changes in contexts and argued that this is difficult to achieve if the middleware is a black box that applications cannot adjust. She showed that the principle of reflection can be used successfully to achieve context awareness. She also showed that trade-off decisions about the provision of quality of service in mobile settings are best made at run-time due to the large number of unforeseen circumstances. She used game theory to develop a micro-economic mechanism for conflict resolution. She developed CARISMA, a prototypical implementation to evaluate the consequences of these primitives on run-time performance and concluded that these can be borne by modern mobile devices.

Licia was funded by a scholarship awarded UCL's Software Systems Engineering group and by Zuhlke Engineering. She concluded her PhD research in October 2003. She is now a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at UCL.

Key Publications:

• L. Capra and W. Emmerich and C. Mascolo (2003). CARISMA: Context-Aware Reflective mIddleware System for Mobile Applications. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 29(10):929-945.
• L. Capra and W. Emmerich and C. Mascolo (2002). A Micro-Economic Approach to Conflict Resolution in Mobile Computing. In Proc. of the 10th ACM SIGSOFT Foundations of Software Engineering Conference, pp. 31-40, ACM Press.