Plenary Speaker

Mike Hinchey

Lero---the Irish Software Research Centre
Evolving Critical Systems

Abstract

Increasingly software can be considered to be critical, due to the business or other functionality which it supports. Upgrades or changes to such software are expensive and risky, primarily because the software has not been designed and built for ease of change. Expertise, tools and methodologies which support the design and implementation of software systems that evolve without risk (of failure or loss of quality) are essential. We address a research agenda for building software in computer-based systems that (a) is highly reliable and (b) retains this reliability as it evolves, either over time or at run-time and illustrate this with a complex example from the domain of space exploration.

Biographical Sketch

Mike Hinchey is Director of Lero—the Irish Software Research Centre and Professor of Software Engineering at University of Limerick, Ireland. Prior to joining Lero, Professor Hinchey was Director of the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory. In 2009 he was awarded NASA’s Kerley Award as Innovator of the Year. Hinchey holds a B.Sc. in Computer Systems from University of Limerick, an M.Sc. in Computation from University of Oxford and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Cambridge. The author/editor of more than 15 books and over 200 articles on various aspects of Software Engineering, at various times Hinchey previously held positions as Full Professor in Australia, UK, Sweden and USA. He is a Chartered Engineer, Chartered Engineering Professional, Chartered Mathematician and Charted Information Technology Professional, as well as a Fellow of the IET, British Computer Society and Irish Computer Society. He is President-Elect of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) and will serve as its President from 2016 to 2019.