Carlo, Software Engineering, and Latin America

VICTOR A. BRABERMAN; MIGUEL FELDER

Matinée with Carlo Ghezzi: from Programming Languages to Software Engineering

Springer Verlag

Año: 2012; p. 167 - 196

This is a short story on how my past links with Carlo Ghezzi explains why my re-search agenda shares several points in common with Carlo´s current work. This is yet another story on how we owe to previous academic generations our way of thinking and the taste for certain types of challenges. Back in 1990 I was a young undergraduate student of CS at University of Buenos Aires (UBA) that had been admitted to ESLAI (Escuela Superior Latinoameicana de Informatica). Unfortunately, golden era of ESLAI was already gone by that time and the ambitious educational project was very close to its end. Carlo had been one of the prestigious professors of ESLAI and he was back at Milan with some of his Argentinean students. One of them was Miguel Felder, who later would become my PhD. advisor. Although very short, ESLAI experience boosted my passion for formal underpin-nings of programming: algebraic data types, abstraction, programming languages semantics, Hoare reasoning machinery, mathematical logic, universal algebras, etc. I have no clue at that time of the existence of something called ?Software Engineering?. In my mind there were no challenges in software development beyond sequential programming. I only have the hope that the tools I was learning might be useful tools in my future career Later in 1994, I started my PhD. at UBA. and Miguel Felder acted as my advisor. New ideas were emerging in the SE arena: recent CSs advances on the modeling of concurrent and reactive systems begun to be applied and adapted to some challenges of SE; in particular to the early operationzations of specifications and designs of real time systems. Proposed specification and design notations were being formalized by means of different computational models. Carlo, students and colleagues were very active on that line of research (e.g. [1], [2]) and thus I had the opportunity to truly enjoy several research visits to Politecnico di Milano during my PhD. My PhD thesis versed on the verification of real-time system designs and was deeply influenced by those seminal works of his team, timed formalisms and rate monotonic analysis (e.g. [3]). Once holding the PhD, my work kept in this line of work by further expanding the capabilities of analysis and ease of description of properties (e.g. [4]) The return of Sebastian Uchitel to Argentina in 2006 also meant co-founding the The Tools and Foundations for Software Engineering Lab at UBA (LAFHIS). That milestone speeded up my entrance to SE community and that is where we bump into Carlo´s work again and again. Carlo has been working on building behavioral models out of different sort of specifications during the last years cite (e.g., [5], [6]). We independently started a line of work to build behavioral models from specifications and code for validation purposes (e.g., [7], [8]) Carlo has been interested in dependability and reliability and has been using and enhancing probabilistic model checking technology (e.g. [9], [10]). We are also working on that direction during the last 3 years (e.g. [11], [12]). We have been using and extending results from supervisory controller systems to analyze and solve foun-dational problems of Requirement Engineering (e.g. [13]). Carlo is interested in the use of results from control theory in adaptive systems Cite (e.g. [14]). I believe all these commonalties are not casualty but causality. Indeed, I am the result of a school of thought on how to approach many problems in SE. That is a school that proposes a computer scientist point of view of phenomena and artifacts involved in engineering of software intensive systems. That is school that Carlo has greatly helped to grow and flourish by different means indifferent countries.