ICECCS 2022

Scope and Topics

Authors are invited to submit papers describing original, unpublished research results, case studies and tools. Papers are solicited in all areas related to complex computer-based systems, including the causes of complexity and means of avoiding, controlling, or coping with complexity. Topic areas include, but are not limited to:

Requirements analysis and specification
Verification and validation
Reliability engineering and faults prediction
Formal engineering methods
SAT/SMT solvers for software analysis and testing
Mode-driven development
Security and privacy of complex systems
Reverse engineering and refactoring
Software architecture
Big data management

Intelligent software tools
Ubiquitous computing, context awareness, sensor networks
Agile methods
Human-Machine Pair Programming
Safety-critical and fault-tolerant architectures
Adaptive, self-managing and multi-agent systems
Cyber-physical systems and IoT
Industrial case studies

Different kinds of contributions are sought, including novel research, lessons learned, experience reports, and discussions of practical problems faced by industry and user domains. The ultimate goal is to build a rich and comprehensive conference program that can fit the interests and needs of different classes of attendees: professionals, researchers, managers, and students. A program goal is to organize several sessions that include both academic and industrial papers on a given topic and culminate panels to discuss relationships between industrial and academic research.

Program

Program has been updated (with Zoom URL).

Download the program here.

Keynote Speakers

Jeffrey Voas
Fellow of IEEE, IET, and AAAS

Title: Software Fault Injection Testing

Abstract: Software reliability testing is traditionally based on the inputs that a system is expected to receive during operation along with the likelihood that they will occur. Inputs that are more likely are more likely are the nominal inputs. Inputs that are less likely to occur are the off-nominal inputs. For critical systems, both types of inputs should be used during testing. However, there is yet a 3^rd type of input that should be considered during V&V, and that is corrupted inputs. It is well known that with software, input data can easily be corrupted. So, the question becomes: What will the software do when that happens? Answering this question is the role of software fault injection testing, and the focus of this talk.

Bio: Jeffrey Voas is an author and innovator. He is currently a computer scientist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD. Before joining NIST in 2009, Voas was an entrepreneur and co-founded Cigital that is now part of Synopsys (Nasdaq: SNPS). He has served as the IEEE Reliability Society President (2003-2005, 2009-2010, 2017-2018), and served as an IEEE Director (2011-2012). Voas co-authored two John Wiley books (Software Assessment: Reliability, Safety, and Testability [1995] and Software Fault Injection: Inoculating Software Against Errors [1998] and was on the Editorial Advisory Board of IEEE Spectrum Magazine (2011-2015). Voas is currently the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computer Magazine (2020-2022). Voas received his undergraduate degree in computer engineering from Tulane University (1985) and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the College of William and Mary (1986, 1990 respectively). Voas is a Fellow of the IEEE, member of IEEE Eta-Kappa Nu (IEEE Honor Society), Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Life member and Fellow of the Washington Academy of Sciences. Voas is a member of ACM and an Emeritus Life member of the College of William and Mary Graduate Studies Board. Voas received the Gold Medal from the US Department of Commerce in 2014.

Michael Butler
Fellow of BCS

Title: Hierarchical analysis and verification for critical system design

Abstract: Safety and security are key considerations in the design of critical systems. Requirements analysis methods rely on the expertise and experience of human intervention to make critical judgements. While human judgement is essential to an analysis method, it is also valuable to ensure a degree of formality so that we reason about safety and security at early stages of analysis and design, rather than detect problems later. Influenced by ideas from STPA, this talk will present a hierarchical analysis process that aims to justify the lower-level of design and flow-down of derived critical requirements arising from safety hazards and security vulnerabilities identified at the higher-level design. At each level, we verify that the design achieves the safety/security requirements by backing the analysis with formal modelling and proof using Event-B refinement. The formal model helps to identify hazards/vulnerabilities arising from the design and how they relate to the safety accidents/security losses being considered at this level. We then re-apply the same process to each component of the design in a hierarchical manner. Thus, we use ideas from STPA, backed by Event-B models, to drive the design, replacing the system level requirements with component requirements. In doing so, we decompose critical requirements down to components, transforming them from abstract system level requirements, towards concrete solutions that we can implement correctly so that the hazards/vulnerabilities are eliminated. Acknowledgements: This research is a collaboration with Asieh Salehi Fathabadi, Colin Snook, Dana Dghaym, Thai Son Hoang, and Fahad Alotaibi.

Bio: Michael Butler is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. He works in the area of mathematical methods for design and verification of safe and secure software-based systems, specialising in model-based formal methods, in particular Event-B. His research work encompasses applications, tools and methodology for formal methods. He has made key theoretical and methodological contributions to the Event-B formal method that enable it to scale to large complex systems. These contributions enable modular analysis in terms of how systems models are structured and analysed as well as methods for development of domain-specific mathematical theories that are reusable across multiple projects.

Bojan Cukic

Title: From Safe and Reliable to Accountable Software and Systems

Abstract: Emphasis on system safety and reliability assessment allowed us to place societal trust on mass-transportation and medical systems, energy, space, financial and military infrastructures, and many other critical domains. As the technology intrudes into all aspects of our lives, existing verification and validation approaches are not sufficient anymore. In addition to meeting safety, reliability, and security standards, we expect systems to protect our privacy, uphold equity, integrity and human rights, perform without biases, and meet other stated and unstated expectations. Further, some of the logic embedded in software may be the product of machine learning, making it unintuitive for humans to understand the rules it encodes, thereby difficult to assess. In this talk, we will discuss software accountability principles. Efforts to regulate software and services are increasing, with the goal of making organizations and individuals more accountable for its consequences. But what constitutes accountable software is not understood well. We will overview the outcomes of traditional software safety assessment processes and compare them with emerging verification needs. Examples from adaptive flight controls and airport passenger management will offer preliminary illustrations of the dimensions of software accountability assurance. Our talk will conclude by outlining opportunities for future research.

Bio: Dr. Bojan Cukic is a Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Student Success in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC). He previously served as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science and the Interim Executive Director of the UNCC Data Science Initiative. Dr. Cukic’s research interests include information assurance and biometrics, software engineering with emphasis on verification and validation, and resilient computing. He received MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Houston, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Rijeka, Croatia.
Dr. Cukic received a National Science Foundation Career award. His research was recognized with the Tycho Brahe award from NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. He often collaborates with industry and has served as the director of the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), an NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center. He co-founded a startup, NexID Biometrics Inc., subsequently acquired by Precise Biometrics.

Tutorials

Kishor S. Trivedi
Duke University, North Carolina, USA
Bio:Kishor Trivedi is the Fitzgerald Hudson Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, Durham, NC. He has a 1968 B.Tech. (EE) from IIT Mumbai and MS’72/PhD’74 (CS) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been on the Duke faculty since 1975. He is the author of a well-known text entitled, Probability and Statistics with Reliability, Queuing and Computer Science Applications, originally published by Prentice-Hall; a thoroughly revised second edition of this book has been published by John Wiley. The book is recently translated into Chinese. He has also published several other books: Performance and Reliability Analysis of Computer Systems, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers and Queueing Networks and Markov Chains, John Wiley. His latest book, Reliability and Availability Engineering is published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. He is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Golden Core Member of IEEE Computer Society. He has published over 600 articles, has supervised 48 Ph.D. dissertations and his h-index is 107. He is the recipient of IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Award for his research on Software Aging and Rejuvenation and IEEE Reliability Society’s Life Time Achievement Award. He has worked closely with industry in carrying our reliability/availability analysis, providing short courses on reliability, availability, and in the development and dissemination of software packages such as HARP, SHARPE, SREPT and SPNP.

Title: Reliability and availability of hardware-software systems

Abstract:High reliability and availability are requirements for most technical systems including computer and communication systems. Reliability and availability assurance methods based on probabilistic models is the topic addressed in this talk. Non-state-space solution methods are often used to solve models based on reliability block diagrams, fault trees and reliability graphs. Relatively efficient algorithms are known to handle systems with hundreds of components and have been implemented in many software packages. Nevertheless, many practical problems cannot be handled by such algorithms. Bounding algorithms are then used in such cases as was done for a major subsystem of Boeing 787. Non-state-space methods derive their efficiency from the independence assumption that is often violated in practice. State space methods based on Markov chains, stochastic Petri nets, semi-Markov and Markov regenerative processes can be used to model various kinds of dependencies among system components. Linux Operating System and WebSphere Application server are used as examples of Markov models. IBM research cloud is used as an example of stochastic Petri net model. However, the state space explosion of such models severely restricts the size of the problem that can be solved. Hierarchical and fixed-point iterative methods provide a scalable alternative that combines the strengths of state space and non-state-space methods and have been extensively used to solve real-life problems. Real-world examples of such multi-level models from IBM, Cisco and Sun Microsystems will be discussed. Hardware systems as well as software systems and their combinations will be addressed via these examples. Novel approaches to software fault tolerance will be discussed.

Kazu Okumoto
Ph. D., CEO, Sakura Software Solutions (3S) LLC
Bio:After retiring from Nokia Bell Labs in 2020 as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Dr. Okumoto founded Sakura Software Solutions (3S), which offers an interactive, real-time, online service for evaluating and improving quality of software being developed. In collaboration with experts from industry and academia he has developed a new innovative tool, STAR, for software quality assurance. Kazu is a well-recognized pioneer in software reliability engineering. He invented a world-famous statistical model for software reliability (known as “Goel – Okumoto model”). His co-authored book on software reliability is a most frequently referenced book in this field. And he has an impressive list of book chapters, keynote addresses, and numerous technical papers to his credit. Since joining Bell Labs in 1980, Kazu worked on many exciting projects for (original) AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel Lucent, and Nokia. He successfully developed software design for reliability as a best practice within Nokia. He has 13 years of management experience, including Bell Labs Field Representative in Japan. He was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. He completed his Ph.D. (1979) and MS (1976) at Syracuse University, and BS (1974) at Hiroshima University.

Title: Software Quality Assurance as a Service (STAR): A revolutionary Approach

Abstract:In this tutorial we will introduce a real-time interactive cloud-based tool, STAR, which implements a revolutionary approach to zero-touch automation for defect prediction. It enables quick and easy decision making across the development cycle to ensure high quality software. Available in STAR, our dynamic tool allows you to see the real-time impact that multiple corrective actions have on software quality & delivery schedule. It really is the most straightforward representation of software quality assurance. It is now available for anybody anytime and anywhere. We will provide a live demonstration of STAR to highlight input data and several output views with state-of-the-art user interface and visualization techniques. From pioneering research in software systems reliability, data networking and reliable distributed computing, to creating fundamental breakthroughs in the understanding and automation of robust software delivery, we pushed the known limits of computing science and how to capitalize on these advances for practical technological innovations. We successfully integrated these innovations into software design for reliability as a best practice.

General Chairs

Shaoying Liu, Hiroshima University, Japan

Tadashi Dohi, Hiroshima University, Japan

Program Chairs

Hiroyuki Okamura, Hiroshima University, Japan

Fatiha Zaidi, Paris-Saclay University, France

Local Arrangement Chair

Jiandong Li, Hiroshima University, Japan

Workshop/Tutorial Chair

Publicity Chair

Publication Chair

Yuting Chen, Shanghai Jiaotong University, China

Web Chair

Program Committee Members

Yamine Ait Ameur, IRIT/INPT-ENSEEIHT, France
Cyrille Valentin Artho, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Guangdong Bai,The University of Queensland, Australia
Luciano Baresi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Sergiy Bogomolov, Newcastle University, UK
Hadrien Bride, The Australian National University, Australia
Lei Bu, Nanjing University, China
Sen Chen, Tianjin University, China
Yuting Chen, Shangahia Jiaotong University, China
Sylvain Conchon, Université Paris Saclay, France
Lingling Fan, Nankai University, China
Sebastien Gerard, CEA, LIST, France
Hiroshi Hosobe, Hosei University, Japan
Zhe Hou, Griffith University, Australia
Fuyuki Ishikawa, NII, Japan
Kenji Kono, Keio University, Japan
Kenichi Kourai, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
Benson Lam, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, China
Kung-Kiu Lau, The University of Manchester, UK
Scott Uk-Lee, Hanyang University (ERICA Campus), Korea
Shang-Wei Lin, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Yun Lin, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Shuang Liu, Tianjin University, China
David Lo, Singapore Management University, Singapore
Gerald Luettgen, University of Bamberg, Germany
Tiziana Margaria, Lero, Ireland
Dominiqu Mery, University of Lorraine, France

Weikai Miao, East China Normal University, China
Seyedali Mirjalili, Griffith University, Australia
Fumiko Nagoya, Nihon University, Japan
Shin Nakajima, NII, Japan
Paolo Nesi, University of Florence, Italy
Manuel Nunez, Universidad Computense de Madrid, Spain
Richard Paige, McMaster University, Canada
Jun Pang, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Chiu-Wing Sham, The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Wuwei Shen, Western Michigan University, US
Fu Song, ShanghaiTech University, China
Jing Sun, The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Jun Sun, Singapore Management University, Singapore
Meng Sun, Peking University, China
Safouan Taha, Central Supélec, France
Tatsuhiro Tsuchiya, Osaka University, Japan
Tullio Vardanega, University of Padua, Italy
Hai H. Wang, University of Aston, UK
Haoyu Wang, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
Shilin Wang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Xi Wang, Shanghai University, China
Hironori Washizaki, Waseda University, Japan
Zhilin Wu, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Xiaofei Xie, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Yinxing Xue, University of Science and Technology, China
Chenyi Zhang, Jinan University,China
Jianjun Zhao, Kyushu University, Japan
Junjun Zheng, Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Steering Committee

Jin Song Dong
Mike Hinchy
Xiaohong Li
Shaoying Liu (Chair)
Mauro Pezze
Roy Sterritt
Jing Sun

The 26^th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems

Welcome to the website of the 26th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2022)

We look forward to your participation.

Important Dates