PhD: MDCF Architect and SAFE

In graduate school, my main research project was the MDCF Architect, an application development environment (built on top of the Eclipse IDE for AADL, called OSATE) for the Medical Device Coordination Framework. It involved a subset of AADL (described in an SEHC 2014 paper, summarized in this blog post)

Part of my research was on how hazard analysis can be performed on those applications. My advisor and I initially looked at integrating STPA with AADL, this was the subject of a MEMOCODE 2014 paper (summarized here).

Based on our experience integrating AADL and STPA, we adapted the technique into a new, STPA-derived hazard analysis technique called SAFE, or the Systematic Analysis of Faults and Errors. A full description of this work is available in my dissertation.

A great deal of safety-critical work is done in the context of standards, and many of these standards involve notions of refinement. My advisor and I looked at how the refinement used in type systems can be made to align with standards-based refinement, and that effort turned into this ASSURE 2015 paper (summarized here).

Here’s a ~15 minute overview of the work I did in grad school. This talk was given to the KSU University Distinguished Professors:

MS: Kinerja

I also work on maintaining / improving Kinerja, a modelchecker and execution environment for YAWL workflows.  It does not have a public release (some dependencies are irreparably broken), but you can read about it in my thesis and if you’re particularly interested, let me know and I can get you the source code.

Teaching

While I was primarily a research assistant at K-State, I did teach a five-week section of a programming languages course. The course materials for that course are on the course page, and all other teaching materials are gathered on my teaching page.