The Software Engineering and Network Systems (SENS) Group is looking for several qualified graduate students to participate in a large collaborative project called 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.

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

BACK to Meridian Homepage