MERIDIAN PROJECT

Available Research Assistantships
=================================


The Software Engineering and Network Systems (SENS)
(http://www.cse.msu.edu/SENS) Group is looking for several qualified
graduate students to participate in a large collaborative project
called Meridian (http://www.cse.msu.edu/Meridian).  Students will work
with one of four faculty members in the CSE Department.  We are
primarily interested in PhD students, but highly qualified MS students
will be considered for focused projects (see skill requirements
below).

The Meridian project investigates how to integrate the analysis, design,
implementation, and testing phases of software development for interactive
distributed applications (IDAs). These applications involve direct
interaction with users, and their processing and data components are
distributed across a network. Three major problems complicate the
development of these systems:

  1. Because IDAs are interactive, validating the functional requirements
     of these systems involves extensive experimentation and testing.

  2. IDAs are typically highly concurrent, and therefore prone to errors,
     such as race conditions, deadlock, and starvation.

  3. Because IDAs are typically constructed by reusing existing
     components, developers require support for component selection,
     integration, and verification.

The project involves the design, integration and validation of a collection
of tools to help automate the development of IDAs. Collectively, these
tools will support diagram-based modeling, rigorous correctness analysis,
software reuse, automated code generation, and software visualization.
Moreover, they will interact with one another through explicit design
representations with formally defined semantics, enabling requirements to
be traced from high-level models to low-level code.

Since this project is multidisciplinary in nature, we are seeking students
in several different areas:

      [Image]  Software Engineering:

                 [Image]  Object-oriented modeling and design.
                 [Image]  Formal methods (e.g., specification languages, model
                          checking, automated reasong).
                 [Image]  Development of medium to large scale systems  in Java
                          or C++.
                 [Image]  Compiler-generation tools (e.g., flex, bison).


      [Image]  Interface Technology and Visualization

                 [Image]  User-interface design.
                 [Image]  User-interface software technology.
                 [Image]  Visualization techniques


      [Image]  Distributed Systems and Networking

                 [Image]  Wireless Multimedia Communication
                 [Image]  Collaborative Computing Applications
                 [Image]  Multicasting and Group Communication Protocols.



Please contact Dr. Betty H.C. Cheng for further information
(chengb@cse.msu.edu).

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