Category: Events

22nd of May at 16h00, Frederico Cerveira will give a presentation entitled“Virtualization and the future” 
Location: G4.1

Bio
Frederico Cerveira is an invited Assistant Professor at University of Coimbra, where he teaches the Compilers, Operating Systems and Software Quality courses. Frederico’s PhD thesis dealt with cloud computing, virtualization and fault tolerance approaches for virtualized systems. He is also interested in fault injection, software testing, dependable automotive systems and failure prediction.

Abstract
Virtualization is now an established technology with prominent use in cloud computing and a few other smaller fields. The ability to consolidate multiple software applications over a single piece of hardware is raising interest in a number of fields, where adoption can be expected in the near to medium future. This talk addresses the areas where virtualization can prove to be useful, lists the challenges behind ensuring resilient virtualization and proposes possible approaches to address these challenges.

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8th of May at 16h00, Fatima Mattiello will give a presentation entitled“Space system engineering challenges and research contributions to the ADVANCE project” 

Bio
Fatima Mattiello has a PhD in Electronics and Computer Engineering – ITA, Master Science in Electronics and Telecommunication – INPE, and Bachelor in Computer Science – ICMC/USP. Space system engineer at the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE), with more than 25-years experience in space projects – small satellites and Cubesat-based nanosatellites.  Docent at INPE´s Graduate Program in Space Engineering and Technology, her research topics of interest are model-based system engineering, verification, validation and testing of software-intensive space systems and concept of operation of space systems. Head of INPE´s Teaching, Research and Capacity Building Coordination (COEPE). Currently, senior researcher on mission at University of Coimbra for the ADVANCE (Addressing Verification and Validation Challenges in Future Cyber-Physical Systems) project, EU-call H2020-MSCA-RISE-2018.

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24th of April at 16h00, José D’Abruzzo Pereira will give a presentation entitled“A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding Conventions” 

Bio
José D’Abruzzo Pereira holds a Ph.D. in Informatics Engineering from the University of Coimbra (UC), is currently an Invited Assistant Professor at the University of Coimbra, and a member of the Software and System Engineering (SSE) group at CISUC. His research interests include security and vulnerability detection, static code analysis, software project management, databases, software quality, and self-adaptive systems. He received a MSc in Information Technology and Software Engineering from the University of Coimbra and Carnegie Mellon University and a BSc. in Computer Science from the State University of Campinas – Brazil (Unicamp). He is also acting as a professor in the Specialization in Software Engineering at the State University of Campinas – Brazil (Unicamp).

Abstract
Coding conventions are a means to improve the reliability of software systems, and they are especially useful to avoid the introduction of known bugs or security flaws. However, coding rules typically come in the form of text written in natural language, which makes them hard to manage and to enforce. Furthermore, relevant rules may depend from the context in which a certain software is deployed, and they may also evolve over time following the discovery of new vulnerabilities or the introduction of new language features. In this talk, we present an approach for the management and enforcement of coding conventions using structured models. We define the Coding Conventions Specification Language (CCSL), a language to define coding rules as structured specifications, from which checkers are derived automatically by code generation. To evaluate our approach, we run a thorough experiment on 8 real open-source projects and 77 coding rules for the Java language, comparing the violations identified by our checkers with those reported by the PMD static analysis tool. The obtained results are promising and confirm the feasibility of the approach. The experiment also revealed that textual coding rules rarely document all the necessary information to write a reliable checker.

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12th of April at 16h00, Patrizio Pelliccione will give an extra presentation entitled“Democratizing the use of robots” 
Location: G4.1

Bio
Patrizio Pelliccione is a Professor in Computer Science at Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI, Italy). Patrizio is also adjunct professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research topics are mainly in software engineering, software architecture modeling and verification, autonomous systems, and formal methods. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of L’Aquila (Italy). Thereafter, he worked as a senior researcher at the University of Luxembourg in Luxembourg, then assistant professor at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, then Associate Professor at both Chalmers | University of Gothenburg in Sweden and University of L’Aquila.He has been on the organization and program committees for several top conferences and he is a reviewer for top journals in the software engineering domain. He is very active in European and National projects. In his research activity, he has collaborated with several companies. More information is available at http://patriziopelliccione.com.

Abstract
Autonomous systems and robots promise to facilitate a myriad of tasks of everyday life. Software engineering is called to play a key role in making robotic research pervasive and ubiquitous and in democratizing the use of robots in everyday-life scenarios. There is the need of rethinking the development processes, as well as the architecting, designing and integration of robotic software. In this talk, I will describe our experience in making robots accessible to people with expertise neither in ICT nor in robotics. Specifically, I will describe our solutions to enable the specification of complex missions for multi-robots in a user-friendly but still accurate and unambiguous way. I will close the talk with a view of future research and development directions.

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10th of April at 16h00, Omid Asghari and Jiawei Wang  will give two short presentations, to promote discussion on two relevant ongoing or disruptive topics. Afterwards, there will be a social gathering where everyone can talk freely on whatever subjects they like.
Location: G4.1

Omid Asghari – “Sensitivity Analysis of Safety Metrics for Monitoring UAV Operations in U-Space”
Bio
Omid is a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Coimbra. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering – Software from the University of Kurdistan and his master’s degree from the Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch in Tehran. During his master’s program, he gained practical experience in the industry as a software developer and application security specialist for six years. Omid’s research interests primarily focus on U-Space safety assessment and the integration of analytical safety assessments with experimentation.
Abstract
In recent years, UAVs have increasingly been utilized in urban environments due to their agility in movement, mechanical simplicity, affordability, and capacity to access locations that are challenging or impossible for humans to reach. With a significant number of drones expected to operate in urban airspace soon, enhancing safety through monitoring drone operations in U-space is essential. To achieve this monitoring, several safety metrics need to be calculated as measurement units.The goal of this research is to monitor drone operations in U-space and calculate UAV operation risks by conducting sensitivity analyses on various safety metrics. This involves assessing the impact of different parameters on these metrics.

Jiawei Wang – “AI-based Safety-critical Components”
Bio
Jiawei Wang is a Ph.D. student at CISUC, University of Coimbra. She received her master’s degree in Software Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology, China, in 2020, with a specialization in Machine Learning applied to perception tasks. Under the supervision of Prof. João Campos, her current research is centered on characterizing and improving safety of AI-based components by addressing biases between data in training and deployment phases.
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become indispensable in safety-critical applications because of its exceptional performance. However, the inherent “black-box” nature often leads to incidents resulting in loss of property and lives. While AI’s capability to autonomously learn from big data surpasses traditional algorithms, the quality of the dataset sets the upper limit on model performance. Dataset bias has remained a persistent challenge in machine learning (ML) since its start. Contemporary approaches such as data augmentation offer some mitigation against bias effects. While achieving comparable performance on data distinct from the training set remains challenging. In our work, we aim to enhance AI safety by identifying, transferring, and mitigating dataset-related biases. In particular, we will consider AI used in the perception components. Our preliminary results reveal there exist distinct dataset-related patterns across various image datasets for pedestrian classification task. Our next step is designing experiments to overcome the influence caused by dataset bias using the ideas from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

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13th of March at 15h30, Gloria-Cerasela Crişan (Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacău, Romania) will give a presentation entitled “Heterogeneous transportation systems: truck-and-drone for efficient deliveries”. Afterwards, (with a short coffee break 🙂) Bruno Jesus and André Bento will give two short presentations, to promote discussion on two ongoing research topics.

Gloria-Cerasela Crişan – “Heterogeneous transportation systems: truck-and-drone for efficient deliveries”

NOTE: this speaker/presentation is made within the context of the ALGO Lab (Adaptive Computation group)

Bio
Gloria Cerasela Crişan received the degree in informatics from the University of Bucharest, Romania, in 1986, and the Ph.D. degree in informatics from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Romania, in 2008.,Since 2016, she has been an Associate Professor with the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacău, Romania. Her research interests include combinatorial optimization problems, metaheuristics, transportation and logistics problems, and GIS.

Abstract
Last-mile delivery (in fact, the last leg of the parcel journey) is generally estimated as having complex logistic aspects and important impact on customer satisfaction. Traditionally, getting a parcel from the last hub to the customer is done using a motor vehicle (car, truck, boat) or a bicycle. Drones (or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – UAVs) do not need roads, and differentiate their service from the traditional transportation modes in multiple ways: light weight, small consumption, high speed, small capacity, short range, weather vulnerability (vs. heavy weight, high consumption, small speed, big capacity, wide range, weather resilience – for trucks, for example). Truck-and-drone cooperative transportation systems are used for about ten years, with major results in customer satisfaction, cost reduction and environmental impact (therefore at the individual, businesses, and societal levels). This presentation aims to describe some theoretical approaches and practical results of such mixed parcel delivery networks.

Bruno Jesus – “Security and Robustness of Gateways on IoT Systems”
Bio
PhD student at the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra, currently a researcher in the Software and Systems Engineering group at the Center for Informatics and Systems (CISUC), where he conducts research related to IoT systems, security, and privacy. Holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from the Postgraduate Program at the Centro de Informática (CIn) of the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (2010), with a research focus on RFID technology and anti-collision protocols. Graduated in Computer Science from the Universidade Federal de Alagoas (2006). Has teaching experience in the field of Computer Science, with emphasis on Introduction to Programming and Computer Networks, as well as in Distance Education. Holds a technical degree in informatics from the Instituto Federal de Alagoas (2004) with a specialization in Systems Analysis and Network Administration.

Abstract
Internet-based systems are present in people’s daily lives, helping to perform various activities and providing greater comfort and ease in communication. In this context of diversification, every day more devices have access to the network, further increasing the reach and distribution of information worldwide. According to the Internet Society, “extending network connectivity and computing power to objects, devices, sensors, and other artifacts that are not normally considered computers” is called the Internet of Things (IoT). Some of the devices, in the IoT systems, are critical devices. In our work, we focus on gateways responsible for collecting and sending data from sensors to an application or the cloud. Because of this, they are the most vulnerable device to be attacked and need maximum security. In our work we intend to identify the main issues related to the robustness and security of integration frameworks used in IoT gateways, by testing the robustness of these components, creating a test case methodology, and performing many test cases for each endpoint. Finally, we will check the behavior of the frameworks in the presence of errors and problems with the data sent.

André Bento – “Towards Optimal Scaling of Cloud Services”
Bio
André Bento is a PhD student at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He received his MSc in 2019 from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, with a thesis on Observing and Controlling Performance in Microservices. His main research topics are anomaly detection, observability, and optimization of resources for cloud services. His research interests include cloud computing, microservices, monitoring, and other distributed systems topics.

Abstract
Cloud services have become increasingly popular for developing large-scale applications due to the abundance of resources they offer. The scalability and accessibility of these resources have made it easier for organizations of all sizes to develop and implement sophisticated and demanding applications to meet demand instantly. As monetary fees are involved in the use of the cloud, one of the challenges for application developers and operators is to balance their budget constraints with crucial quality attributes, such as availability. Industry standards usually default to solutions that cannot simultaneously consider competing objectives. Our research addresses this challenge by proposing a Cost-Availability Aware Scaling (CAAS) approach that uses multi-objective optimization of availability and cost. We evaluate CAAS using two open-source microservices applications, yielding improved results compared to the industry standard CPU-based Autoscaler (AS). CAAS can find optimal system configurations with higher availability, between 1 and 2 nines on average, and reduced costs, 6% on average, with the first application, and 1 nine of availability on average, and reduced costs up to 18% on average, with the second application. The gap in the results between our model and the default AS suggests that operators can significantly improve the operation of their applications.

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28th of February at 16h00, Helder Sousa will give a presentation entitled“Strengthening proximity between Academia and Industry” 
Location: G4.1

Bio
Helder Sousa is a seasoned software engineer and leader with a background in Computer and Systems Engineering. He has extensive experience in Business Critical Enterprise Systems and has held various roles at Critical Software, including Project Engineer, Software Architect, Engineering Manager, and Product Manager for edgeBOX. He later founded and served as CTO of the Smart Technologies Solutions division at Critical Software, with extensive expertise on the UK’s Smart Metering Implementation Programme. Currently, he is on a sabbatical, working on an initiative to bridge the gap between academia and industry.

Abstract
It is generally perceived in Portugal that the relationship between Universities and the Industry has a long way to reach full potential. This is the main premise for the initiative. Having had conversations with the key roles at Critical Software, DEI and CISUC, the premise held up and this initiative was welcomed and seen as valuable to all parts. The initiative will experiment and develop ways of increasing the potential of the relationship between Academia and Industry.For efficiency and focus the relationship between DEI/CISUC and CSW will be used as case study and main subject of interest. Conclusions and proposals for future shall be taken with a global perspective following the mindset ”Think Globally, Act Locally”.In this presentation I’ll go through the foundations of the initiative, the main developing areas and incite you to join and participate on this journey of proximity.

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