Author: Sam
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A Trip To Reggio Di Calabria
I recently went to Reggio Di Calabria, a city in southern Italy, to present to present a paper I wrote at a workshop / conference. The trip was good, and (predictably, for Southern Italy in August) quite hot. I spent an afternoon and evening in Rome before taking a train south to Reggio Calabria. While…
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Simultaneous Analysis of Safety and Security of a Critical System
This post was originally published on the SEI Insights Blog. As computers become more powerful and ubiquitous, software and software-based systems are increasingly relied on for business, governmental, and even personal tasks. While many of these devices and apps simply increase the convenience of our lives, some—known as critical systems—perform business- or life-preserving functionality. As…
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I got a job!
After finishing my PhD, I got a job working at the Software Engineering Institute as an “Architecture Researcher.” I’m on the Architecture Led Modeling and Analysis team, where I’m privileged to work with people like Peter Feiler and others on — as the name implies — (software) architecture-centric modeling tools/techniques and analyses. In some ways,…
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SAFE and Secure: Deeply Integrating Security in a New Hazard Analysis
One of my dissertation‘s main contributions was a new hazard analysis technique called the “Systematic Analysis of Faults and Errors” or SAFE. Hazard analysis techniques are, as I wrote about in 2014, structured ways of reasoning about and (typically) documenting the ways that things can go wrong in a given system. While traditionally these techniques…
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I finished my PhD!
On June 17, I successfully defended my doctoral research. Last week, I received final approval of my dissertation. It feels pretty weird to say it, but I now have a PhD, and am “Dr. Procter.” I’m finding it hard to summarize the entirety of my grad school experience, so I won’t try. Rather, I’ll say…
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A trip to Delft
In July I wrote about a recent paper covering my lab’s recent work with a concept called “Error Type Refinement.” Then, in late September, I got to travel to the city of Delft in the Netherlands and present the work. I presented at the ASSURE workshop, which was co-located with this year’s SAFECOMP conference. The…
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Error Type Refinement for Assurance of Families of Platform-Based Systems
Last time I wrote about my work, I mentioned that we were using the architectural modeling language AADL to describe a particular type of distributed, compositional medical applications called Medical Application Platform (MAP) apps. One neat aspect of AADL is that the core language — which describes hardware and software architectures — can be extended…
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A trip to Lübeck, Germany
My work with medical devices took me to Lausanne, Switzerland last month, and since I was already halfway around the world my advisor and I decided a trip up north to Lübeck, Germany to visit medical device manufacturer Dräger made sense. The work I did there was really cool — in contrast to the conference…
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A trip to Lausanne, Switzerland
I recently mentioned that a paper I wrote got accepted to MEMOCODE, a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. Having never been out of the country before, a trip to Europe was really exciting. It was also a little imposing — I would be traveling alone to a place with no knowledge of the local language (in…
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An Architecturally-Integrated, Systems-Based Hazard Analysis for Medical Applications
A few months ago, I wrote about my recent work on defining a subset of the language AADL to specify the architecture of bits of software (apps) that would run on medical application platforms (MAPs). Since then, I’ve been working on how developers can use these semi-formal architectural descriptions to do useful things. The first…