- Formal methods in software development
- Autonomic and reactive systems
- Software measurement frameworks
- Formalization of nonfunctional requirements
- Categorical Framework for the Development of Concurrent Systems (Active, in colalboration with Dr Grogono. Student Ming Zhu)
The goal of this project is to explore the applicability of the previously researched Reactive Autonomic Systems Framework
(RASF) to provide a categorical framework for verifying design and implementation of concurrent
systems. Category Theory (CT) for software engineering adopts the correct by construction approach
where components are specified, proved and composed to preserve their structures.
CT has been proposed as a formal method in this project to model interaction structures
and prove concurrent system properties. A novel Categorical Framework for the Development of
Concurrent Systems with Process-Oriented Languages was proposed for formally designing,
implementing, and verifying consistency of communications in concurrent systems.
A case study was proposed to illustrate the framework and the theoretical concepts defevoped in
this research.
- Automatic Detection of Cyber-predators in Social Media (Status: active. In collaboration with Dr Suen. Student: Mohammadreza Ebragimi)
This research addresses the problem of automatic detection of cyber-predators in social media. The aim of this research proposal is to apply innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and best Software Engineering practices to conduct passive, active, and real-time psychological, behavioral and criminal profiling of online predators
- Model-based Patient Preference Elicitation in Support of Treatment Decision Making (Status: active. Student: Mandana Omidbakhsh)
Numeracy skill level of patients has great influence on their preferences and priorities for the treatment options
concerning their healthcare.
Not properly numeracy-assessed patients are prone to make inaccurate and inappropriate decisions for their medical treatments.
There are many challenges that the researchers face in designing and developing patient-sensitive numeracy assessment methods.
The adaptability of the numeracy assessment is considered to be one of the most important issues to address.
In this project we propose a goal-driven confidence-based model for patient numeracy assessment (C-PNA) adaptable to each individual patient. The model is empirically validated in a case study.
- CON-INFO: A Context-based Methodology for Designing and Assessing the Quality of
Adaptable MUIs in Healthcare Applications (Status: completed. Student: Reem Alnanih)
The research contributions of this project are: (1) a new quality-in-use measurement model for validation purposes; (2) user stereotype modeling with a set of context descriptors, which formalize the domain expertise of the users; (3) context information modeling; and (4) use of the decision table technique to adapt the MUI features based on the context and the user stereotypes. The proposed quality-in-use model is inspired by the ISO/IEC 25010 and ISO/IEC 25022 international standards and adapted to healthcare applications. The first contribution is used in validating the quality-in-use of a software product developed according to the CON-INFO methodology, and the last three contributions are linked to form a methodology for development.
The MUI features adapted to the needs of healthcare professionals have been implemented on the iPhone™ for validation purposes.
- Automated Quality Assurance of Nonfunctional Requirements for Testability (Status: completed. In collaboration with Dr Witte.
Student: Abderahman Rashwan)
The contributions of this project are: (1) building a generic ontology which represents the main concepts
in the requirements and their relations. (2) Based on this generic ontology, two
corpora are developed: The first one is a new gold standard corpus containing annotations
for different NFR types. The second one is for requirements phrases and
testability. (3) A Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to automatically categorize
requirements sentences into the different ontology classes is introduced. (4)
Finally, a rule-based text mining system is used to analyze requirement phrases
and to flag non-testable NFRs.
- Using Tag Clouds as a Tool for Patients’ Medical History Visualization and Record Retrieval (Status: completed.
In collaboration with Dr Pitula. Student: Daphne Foldes)
The medical community is under increasing pressure to use computer-based systems to support the clinical side of their practices.
This project proposed a visualization tool that makes use of a Tag Cloud that would allow a healthcare practitioner to easily visualize
and retrieve the essential elements of a patient’s medical record.
A prototype was created to run usability testing of the Tag Cloud tool.
The findings of this usability testing showed that such a visualization tool would be helpful to paramedical practitioners seeing a
patient for the first time, as well as when dealing with patients who have a lengthy medical history.
