Keynotes


Software defects?! Stay Away from them! Do Inspections!
Guilherme Horta Travassos, COPPE/UFRJ and a CNPq.

Abstract: All software system fails! However, as more defects the development team can identify and remove as lower will be the probability of software failures. Identifying and removing defects throughout the software development process represent an important  strategy to contribute with software quality increasing.  There is evidence about the feasibility, efficiency and efficacy of using software inspections to support the identification of defects. Besides their low cost, the performance of inspections can be positively influenced by the technique used to detect defects. Despite all these benefits, the use of inspections is not common place in the software industry. Therefore, this talk intends to discuss the benefits of Software Inspections (the method and techniques) and their applicability in software projects, showing a set of evidence based reading techniques that can be used to inspect different types of software artifacts.

Speaker Bio
: Guilherme Horta Travassos is a professor at COPPE/UFRJ and a CNPq (Brazilian Research Council) Researcher. He holds a DSc in Systems Engineering and Computer Science from COPPE/UFRJ, with a post-doc in experimental Software Engineering at UMCP/USA. He leads the Experimental Software Engineering Group at COPPE/UFRJ and is a member of ISERN, SBC and ACM. Apart from that, he takes part in the editorial board of Elsevier - IST, World Scientific - IJSEKE and Springer-JSERD. Further information at http://www.cos.ufrj.br/~ght 
     

Data driven software engineering – Can we change what we can measure?
Michaela Greiler, Microsoft Research.

Abstract: Tom DeMarco states that “You can’t control what you can’t measure”, but how much can we change and control (with) what we measure? This talk investigates the opportunities and limits of data-driven software engineering, shows which opportunities lie ahead of us when we engage in mining and analyzing software engineering process data, but also highlights important factors that influence the success and adaptability of data-based improvement approaches.

Speaker Bio
: Michaela Greiler works as a software engineer and researcher at Microsoft in the TSE (Tools for Software Engineers) team and in close collaboration with the Empirical Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research (MSR). Michaela focuses on data-driven software engineering – that is improving software development practices and processes by mining and analyzing engineering process data. She received a PhD in Software Engineering from the Delft University of Technology for her research on Test Suite Comprehension and holds a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.       



Conceptual models versus ontologies

Stefano Spaccapietra, EPFL, Switzerland

Abstract:The overwhelming use of Internet emphasizes the need for efficient techniques aiming at facilitating the understanding of the information that is found over the Web. This need for understanding is mostly addressed nowadays through the development of ontologies. Still, rather than simply relying on most traditional taxonomic ontologies (e.g. Wordnet), advanced approaches tend to develop to more descriptive ontologies. These are intended to provide agreed descriptions of the data structures representing the complex organization of objects and links of interest within the targeted domain.  We are very close here to the goal usually associated with conceptual modeling when in a database environment.
This talk analyzes the requirements for descriptive ontologies, and contrast the requirements to the functionality provided by some current representative approaches that have been proposed for ontology management. Selected approaches originate from research in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and database conceptual modeling.

Speaker Bio: Stefano Spaccapietra is a honorary professor at EPFL, Switzerland, where he has been heading the database laboratory for over 20 year. He has been in academic positions all along his career. He got his PhD from the University of Paris VI, in 1978, where he first had his master in Computer Science in 1969. At that time, he has been teaching file systems, later turned into teaching database systems. He moved to the University of Burgundy, Dijon, in 1983 to take a professor position at the Institute of Technology. He left Dijon for EPFL in 1988.
Prof. Spaccapietra is a Fellow of the IEEE and recipient of the IFIP Silver Core Award and ER Award. He is an ER fellow. He has been Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Semantics (LNCS subline), Springer. He is member of the editorial boards of the Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal (Elsevier), the Internet and Web Information Systems Journal (Kluwer), the Revue Internationale de Géomatique (Hermes), and the Computing Letters Journal (CoLe), VSP/Brill. He was former Chair of the IFIP Working Group 2.6 "Databases" and of the ER Conferences Steering Committee. He also chaired many conference program committees. He co-authored several books, a large number of journal papers, and a very large number of conference papers.