I'm a Professor (brief bio sketch,full CV) in the Computing and information Sciences Department at Kansas State University, and I lead the laboratory for Specification, Analysis, and Transformation of Software (SAnToS). SAnToS aims to develop and mature technologies and tools for effective construction of high-confidence software systems.

SAnToS Laboratory emphasizes a research methodology in which research advances are achieved by building robust tools that can be applied to and evaluated against real systems in the context of realistic development practices, and then using insights gained in these evaluations to guide future research directions and priorities. In these efforts, we rely on extensive interaction with our industrial partners to gain insight into particular foundational advances and tool capabilities that will be necessary to affect practice. SAnToS tools have been used in a number of academic research groups world-wide and in projects by engineers at Boeing (Phantom Works, St. Louis), Lockheed Martin, and Rockwell-Collins.

SAnToS Researchers were members of the NASA Java Pathfinder Team that in 2003 received NASA's Turning Goals Into Reality (TGIR) Award -- one of fifteen awards given to NASA projects in 2003 that best demonstrated progress toward NASA's mission objectives. In May 2005, SAnToS' Cadena environment was used by Boeing engineers to develop the avionics software flown on the Scan Eagle Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) platform for the DARPA PCES capstone demo at White Sands Missile Range.

SAnToS Laboratory has been funded through agencies and companies such as the National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, DARPA, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell Collins, IBM, and Intel (list of funded projects).

SAnToS Researchers collaborate with researchers from the ESQuaReD Lab at University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Current Research Emphases My general interests include:

software model checking, software architectures, foundations of model-driven for component middleware frameworks, static and dynamic analysis of programs, program slicing, partial evaluation and program specialization, and program logics.

I'm working on several other projects involving developing tools and techniques for Java program analysis/verification, model driven development of distributed systems, and applying these techniques to construct high-assurance software systems.

• Bogor --- a customizable/extensible model-checker for object-oriented software emphasizing the notion of domain-specific model-checking
• Cadena --- a robust tool environment for modeling, analysis, and model-driven development of large-scale distributed systems built using component middleware frameworks such as the CORBA Component Model (CCM) or Enterprise Java Beans (EJB)
• Bandera --- a tool suite for detecting hard-to-find defects in concurrent Java software using model-checking techniques
• Indus --- a featureful program slicer and static analysis framework for Java

All of the tools above are implemented in IBM's Eclipse platform, and they've been used by a number of different academic and industrial research groups.

Current Service Projects I'm currently involved in organizing the following meetings/events:

• I'm general chair of the ACM SIGPLAN 2008 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM '08)San Francisco, CA, January 7-8, 2008.

I'm currently serving on the following program committees (click here for past program committee and other service efforts within the international research community).

• 15th International SPIN Workshop on Model Checking of Software (SPIN 2008), August 10-12, 2008, Los Angeles, USA
• 10th IFIP International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-based Distributed Systems (FMOODS'08), June 4-6, 2008, Oslo, Norway.
• 2007 ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2007)
• 2007 Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS'2007) -- part of the ETAPS 2007 Joint Conference, Braga, Portugal
• National Workshop on High Confidence Software Platforms for Cyber Physical Systems (November 30-December 1, 2006)
• 2006 TAIC PART -- Testing: Academia and Industrial Conference - Practice and Research Techniques. Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, UK, 29th-31st August, 2006

Invited Talks Upcoming and recent invited talks:

• Tenth International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods (ICFEM 2008) -- keynote talk, Kitakyushu, Japan, October 27-31, 2008.
• 2006 TAIC PART -- Testing: Academia and Industrial Conference - Practice and Research Techniques -- keynote talk. Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, UK, 29th-31st August, 2006. Talk topic: Model-checking concurrent software systems with Bogor.
• Sixth IEEE International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation -- keynote talk. Philadelphia, PA, USA, 27th-29th September 2006. Talk topic: Slicing concurrent Java programs with Indus.

Click here for previous invited talks and tutorials.