GMU Software Engineering Seminar Series

 

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Date: Tues, 7/6/2010

Time: 12:00 – 1:00pm

Location: 4801, Engineering

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Title: Application-level utility functions for self-assessment and self-adaptation

Speaker: Giuseppe Valetto, Drexel University

Abstract

This talk presents the idea of application-level utility, as a way to assess a running software system, as well as direct its adaptation. Utility is a scalar that expresses the current health or value of an application in an abstract way, without necessarily engaging in deep analysis of the causes and significance of incidents and conditions that can occur at run time and influence the application's behavior. Our research aims at the automated synthesis of utility functions on the basis of monitorable and measurable dimensions of the runtime state of an application, in order to produce a map that associates the trajectory of that application state to a simple value indicating whether the software is fulfilling some intended task. We present some results on utility-based self-assessment based on a process of software instrumentation and monitoring, statistical analysis of the monitored data, and embedding of synthesized utility functions within the application runtime, to achieve continuous self-assessment. We also discuss paths for further automating the synthesis of utility functions, and how to use the knowledge intrinsic to those utility functions to make decision about, and implement, self-adaptation strategies.

 

Bio

Giuseppe (Peppo) Valetto has received his Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering in 1992 from the Politecnico di Torino - Turin, Italy, and his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, in 1994 and 2004 respectively. He has worked for 15 years as a researcher in software engineering and distributed systems, in academia as well as industry, including a post-doc at the T.J. Watson research center in Hawthorne, NY, USA. Since 2007, he has joined Drexel University, in Philadelphia, PA., USA, as an assistant professor. Peppo's current research interests include methods and facilities for the engineering of autonomic, self-adaptive software systems, and the investigation and support of software development teams, their coordination and their governance.