Automated Software Engineering

ASE20012001


Keynote Address : Software Assistance Revisited


Bob Balzer

Chief Technical Officer
Teknowledge Corporation
Marina del Rey, California

Abstract

Computer usage has evolved from small special purpose applications to large COTS products that dominate the landscape. These COTS products present major challenges for our traditional software assistance paradigm.
This talk will explore those challenges and suggest research opportunities for software assistance in interfacing to COTS products, in integrating them with other components, and in using them.

Biography

Dr. Robert Balzer received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1964, 1965, and 1966, respectively.
After several years at the Rand Corporation, he left to help form the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) and serve as Professor of Computer Science at USC and Director of ISI's Software Sciences Division.
In 2000, after 28 years at ISI, he left to become the Chief Technical Officer at Teknowledge Corporation and to open the new headquarters for Teknowledge's Distributed Systems Group in Marina del Rey. This group combines Artificial Intelligence, Database, and Software Engineering techniques to automate the software development process and support distributed systems. Current research includes wrapping COTS products to provide safe and secure execution environments, extend their functionality, and integrate them together; instrumenting software architectures; and generating systems from domain specific specifications.
He has served as chairman of SIGART (The ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence); as program chairman for the First National Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence; chairman of the Los Angeles Organizing Committee for the 1985 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI); program co-chair for the 9th International Conference on Software Engineering, held in the Spring of 1987 in Monterey, California, and whose theme was ``Formalizing and Automating the Software Process'', co-chair for the 1st Intelligent Information Systems Workshop, held at Niagra-on-the-lake, Ontario, Canada, April, 1991, and co-char of the 4th International Software Architecture Workshop in 2000. Elected AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) Fellow, 1993.