Subject: (SEWORLD) Peter Chen to Receive the 2001 Stevens Award Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 15:10:38 -0700 (MST) From: Elliot Chikofsky To: seworld@cs.colorado.edu Peter Chen has been named the seventh recipient of the international Stevens Award for advancing software development methods. The award will be presented on Thursday, November 8, 2001, at the 2001 International Conference on Software Maintenance in Florence, Italy. The prestigious Stevens Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the literature or practice of methods for software and systems development. The prior recipients are: -- Gerald Weinberg (2000), expert on the interaction of technical and human issues in computer programming and systems development (USA); -- Tom DeMarco (1999), principal of Atlantic Systems Guild and noted analyst and authority on software project management, methods, and people processes (USA); -- Tom McCabe (1998), software metrics expert and creator of cyclomatic complexity analysis (USA); -- Michael Jackson (1997), creator of the Jackson Software Development methods (United Kingdom); -- David Harel (1996), professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and founder of i-Logix and the Statemate toolset; and, -- Tony Wasserman (1995), founder and chairman of Interactive Development Environments (USA) and the Software Through Pictures toolset. The 2001 recipient, Peter Chen, is Foster Distinguished Chair Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University. Dr. Chen popularized and promoted the use of Entity-Relationship ("E-R") modeling of data and processes since the late 1970s and had a key role in the growth of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) techniques and tools. Conceptual modeling, founded in Peter Chen's work, directly utilizes key business concepts in expressing requirements and designing information technology (IT) solutions. E-R diagrams can be used to express data requirements in business terms and can be used to document and analyze business rules. The same kind of diagrams can be used by IT professionals and systems analysts to understand and document systems data requirements technical implementation designs. The Unified Modeling Language notation (UML), popular in 2001 for systems modeling and object-oriented development, has Chen's E-R modeling as one of its key roots. According to Prof. Peter Aiken, director of the Institute for Data Research at Virginia Commonwealth University, "Peter Chen's work on E-R modeling made two very important contributions to information technology. His formalization of E-R concepts as a graphical specification - the proverbial "picture is worth a thousand words" - has been a key foundation of data modeling over the last 25 years. And, because the communication medium of E-R diagramming was straightforward and simple for business professionals and managers to understand, the approach enhanced the ability for IT to produce relevant results and communicate with the business users. Both of these have fostered two-way communication that we rely on to build the robust systems needed by business today." Chris Verhoef, professor of computer science at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands, points out that "much in software engineering has been built on Peter Chen's basis. Entity-relationship modeling has become so natural a part of the field that some people no longer realize that someone had to introduce it." The Stevens Award is named in memory of Wayne Stevens (1944-1993), a highly-respected consultant, author, pioneer, and advocate of the practical application of software methods and tools. His 1974 IBM Systems Journal article "Structured Design" was the first published on the topic and has been widely reprinted. Stevens was the author of the books: "Software Design: Concepts and Methods" (Prentice-Hall Intl, 1991) and "Using Structured Design" (Wiley, 1981). His last article "Data Flow Analysis and Design" appears in the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering (Wiley, 1994). Stevens was the chief architect of application development methodology for IBM's consulting group. The Stevens Award is presented by IWCASE, an international association of users, researchers, and developers of software tools, methods, and technology. Stevens was a member of the IWCASE board of directors. The 2001 award presentation will be held on November 8 at the ICSM 2001 conference (Florence, Italy, 6-10 November 2001), the major international meeting in the field of software and systems maintenance, evolution, and management. Reference web sites: http://iwcase.org/stevens/ - Stevens Award background http://www.dsi.unifi.it/icsm2001 - ICSM 2001 conference IWCASE Executive Board President: Dennis Smith, Software Engineering Institute, USA Exec Secy: Elliot Chikofsky, Engineering Management & Integration, USA Treasurer: Francois Coallier, Bell Canada, Canada Past Pres / Stevens Comm Chair: John Jenkins, Chai Wan Inst for Vocational Education, Hong Kong Board Members: David Budgen, Keele University, UK Gene Forte, Intel Corporation, USA Gene Hoffnagle, IBM Corporation, USA Paul Layzell, UMIST, University of Manchester, UK Hausi Mueller, University of Victoria, Canada Karl Reed, La Trobe University, Australia Jacob Slonim, Dalhousie University, Canada Scott Tilley, University of California Riverside, USA Jos Trienekens, Technical Univ Eindhoven, Netherlands June Verner, Drexel University, USA International Workshop on CASE Inc. / IWCASE P.O. Box 400, Burlington, MA 01803 USA +1 (781) 272-0049; fax +1 (781) 272-8464 http://iwcase.org/ ============================================================ To contribute to SEWORLD, send your submission to . http://www.cs.colorado.edu/serl/seworld provides more information on SEWORLD as well as a complete archive of messages posted to the list. To subscribe to SEWORLD, send the following (as the body of a message) to : subscribe seworld end To unsubscribe from SEWORLD, send the following (as the body of a message) to : unsubscribe seworld end ============================================================