The strategic recruiting for strengthening of different research areas within WASP has reached its first stage. Eight WASP professors have been recruited to the program and two of them are Professor Benoit Baudry and Professor Martin Monperrus. As experts on software technology, both have started at their positions at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and will strengthen one of the very core areas of WASP.
Professor Benoit Baudry, KTH.
Professor Benoit’s most recent position was as research scientist leading the DiverSE group (Diversity-centric software engineering) at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). He coordinates an EU-funded project on software technology. He also coordinated the DIVERSIFY project, a consortium of interdisciplinary experts investigating diversity emergence in software applications. Within WASP Baudry will focus on resilience in large open software systems.
Within WASP, Professor Baudry will focus on resilience in large open software systems. Software diversification can contribute to reducing the asymmetry between unstable environments and the rigidity of software. Today, software applications are cloned over millions of devices. This homogeneity facilitates wide adoption but also introduced a major risk: if there is a bug it is present in millions of clones. The idea of diversification is to still have millions of programs distributed all over the world, but all slightly different to prevent massive scale failure, says Benoit Baudry.
Another factor is adaptability: we have millions of copies of the exact same code, for instance running an application on all the iPhones of the world. The end users are however individuals and with diversification and fitness to the environment the application could adapt to the user or the usage of the phone. The slight adaptation of the software to its surrounding would entail protection against massive scale failure as well. With his experience in software testing, model-driven engineering, software metrics and diversification, Professor Baudry will add valuable knowledge to WASP in one of its core areas.
Professor Martin Monperrus, KTH.
Professor Martin Monperrus holds expertise in self-healing software. He received his PhD in generative programming from University of Rennes and between 2008 and 2011 he held a position as research associate at Darmstadt University of Technology. From 2011 onward, he was associate professor at the University of Lille and member of INRIA’s research group SPIRALS (Self-adaptation for distributed services and large software systems). As professor in software technology at KTH one of his research questions will be how to construct less brittle software in ultra open environments. Previous work by Professor Monperrus includes the use of AI in software development and automatic program repair.
– Self-healing software carries the idea of software not crashing when an unexpected event happens, and instead maintaining available service, says Martin Monperrus.
Conceptually self-healing software could be widely applied in particular in large scale distribution systems, he continues. Professor Monperrus’ self-healing software technology research spans automatic recovery, exception handling, program repair, patch generation and anti-fragile chaos engineering.
Together, Professor Baudry and Professor Monperrus will form and contribute to a core software technology laboratory at KTH, and work closely with the existing software engineering community at KTH and within WASP.
Published: October 20th, 2017