http://www.inf.unisi.ch/

Contact person: Alexander L. Wolf



Skill: The new Faculty of Informatics at the Universita' della Svizzera Italiana (Lugano) was established in October 2004. It has an experienced and growing faculty currently consisting of six internationally prominent professors, as well as a number of adjunct faculties from important European universities and research institutes. The research focus of the faculty is on all issues related to large-scale software-intensive systems, lying at the intersection of distributed systems, software engineering, and networking. On-going projects are in the areas of pervasive and ubiquitous computing, sensor networks, network processors, middleware for mobile and ad hoc networking, publish/subscribe and content-based networking, software architecture, evolution and visualization. The faculty have extensive experience in national (Austria, Italy, Switzerland, USA) and international (EU) research projects.

Role: The members of the USI faculty associated with the PLASTIC project will make contributions in several critical areas. They will contribute to the initial-phase conceptual modelling effort by applying their experience in developing a unified component model that abstracts from existing component models, to allow composition of components across different models and environments. They will contribute their expertise in autonomic, self-managed component-based distributed systems to the challenge of automating the deployment of services to heterogeneous mobile devices. To provide a flexible communication infrastructure for the dissemination of context, monitoring, and other information, they will integrate their content-based publish/subscribe technology into the middleware platform. In the area of service validation tools, they will provide an on-line monitoring facility for detecting deviations from expected behaviour, and an off-line testbed environment for modelling and executing clients that can exercise service compositions. Finally, they will contribute to the integration and evaluation effort by building usable prototypes for use by the other project teams.



CVs of key persons:

Carlo Ghezzi is a Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Electronics and Information of Politecnico di Milano and an Adjunct Professor at USI, Switzerland. He received his Dr.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where he has spent most of his professional career. He taught at the universities of Padova (Italy) and North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). He spent sabbatical periods in the USA at UCLA and UCSB. He has been a Guest Professor at The Escuela Superior Latino-Americana de Informatica (ESLAI, Argentina), at the University of Klagenfurt and at the Tecnical University of Vienna, Austria, and at USI, Switzerland. Prof. Ghezzi is an ACM Fellow. Prof. Ghezzi's research interests are in software engineering and programming languages. He is currently interested in the theoretical, methodological, technological, and organizational issues involved in developing network applications. He has participated in several EU projects, the most recent of which are OPELIX, MOTION and SeCSE. He is a co-author of over 130 scientific papers. He is also a co-author of eight books, including Programming Language Concepts, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, and Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science. Prof. Ghezzi was the Program Chair of the 2nd European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC-2), Program Co-Chair of the 6th IEEE Workshop on Software Specification and Design, Program Co-chair of the IEEE 14th Int.l Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-14), and Program Chair of the 9th Int.l Software Process Workshop (ISPW-9). He was General Chair of ICSE, Limerick, Ireland, June 2000. He was a member of the editorial board (and associate editor-in-chief) of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering until 1999. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and an associate editor of Software Process Improvement and Practice, and Science of Computer Programming. Prof. Ghezzi has been a member of international committees for research funding in Sweden (NUTEK), Finland (Academy of Sciences), Canada, and the USA (NSF). He has been member of the evaluation board of JAIST (Japan Advanced Institute of Technology), of the Research Assessment Exercise for UK Universities (Computer Science), and of the Advisory Board of the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne), School of Computer and Communication Sciences. Prof. Ghezzi has been a member of several committees of the Italian Government (Ministry of Finances, Ministry of University and Research, Ministry of Education). More information is available at http://www.elet.polimi.it/upload/ghezzi/.

Mehdi Jazayeri is a Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Informatics at USI. He is also Professor of Computer Science and heads the Distributed Systems Group at the Technical University of Vienna. He is interested in programming, software engineering, programming languages, and distributed systems. Prof. Jazayeri has participated in several European projects, including the IST project Easy Composition (EASYCOMP), the IST project Mobile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organization Networks (MOTION), the IST project Security Policy Adaptation Reinforced Through Agents (SPARTA), and the ESPRIT Framework IV project Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Systems (ARES). Prof. Jazayeri has co-authored several highly successful texts, including Programming Language Concepts (1982, 1987, 1998) and Fundamentals of Software Engineering (1991, 2002). He has worked at both technical and management capacities at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, Synapse Computer Corporation, Ridge Computers, and TRW Vidar. He spent two years in Pisa, Italy, to set up and manage a joint research project on parallel systems between Hewlett-Packard and the University of Pisa. He has been an assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, adjunct professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Santa Clara, and San Jose State University. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki (1979) and a visiting professor at the Politecnico di Milano (1988). He was a principal investigator on several European projects dealing with software architectures and advanced distributed systems. Prof. Jazayeri is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of ACM, the Austrian, German, and Swiss Computer Societies. He holds degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SB, 1971) and Case Western Reserve University (MS, 1973; PhD, 1975). He has been a consultant to the US Government and to multinational companies in the areas of software engineering, design, architecture, and processes. More information is available at http://www.inf.unisi.ch/jazayeri/.

Amy L. Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Informatics at USI, Switzerland. She received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Tulsa in 1995, and M.S. and D.Sc. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1997 and 2000 respectively. She spent three years as an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, New York and one year as a visiting researcher at Politecnico di Milano, Italy before joining the faculty in Lugano. Her research interests include the design, specification, and implementation of middleware systems for mobile ad hoc, sensor, and dynamic peer to peer networks. The driving theme of the work is to enable the rapid development of dependable applications for these complex environments. More information is available at http://www.inf.unisi.ch/murphy/.

Alexander L. Wolf is a Professor in the Faculty of Informatics at USI, Switzerland, since October 2004. He also holds an appointment as Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Prior to this he was a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. While at AT&T, Dr. Wolf conducted research in the areas of large-scale distributed software systems, object-oriented database management systems, software process measurement and evaluation, and program analysis tools. At the University of Colorado, Prof. Wolf directed the Software Engineering Research Laboratory, whose funding level averaged approximately $1M USD per year over the past ten years. In 2003 he founded the Computer and Communications Security Research and Education Center. Prof. Wolf is a faculty affiliate of the Science and Technology Policy Research Center and the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles at the University of Colorado. His research interests are in the discovery of principles and development of technologies to support the engineering of large, complex software systems. He has published papers in a variety of areas, including software architecture, software process, and configuration management, and most recently in the areas of security, survivability, dynamic reconfiguration, and content-based networking. These projects have resulted in the construction of several innovative prototypes in use today. Prof. Wolf received a B.A. degree in Geology and Computer Science from Queens College, City University of New York. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Prof. Wolf is serving as Chair of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) and is on the executive committee of the ACM SIG Governing Board. He has served on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and the Software Process Journal. Prof. Wolf has been a program chair of several international conferences, including the 2000 International Conference on Software Engineering. He is on the executive committee of the Impact Project, which is aimed at understanding and documenting the impact of software engineering research on software engineering practice. More information is available at http://www.inf.unisi.ch/wolf/.