index

--- Professor Jeff Kramer ---

   Dean of the Faculty of Engineering

&   Professor of Distributed Computing

Distributed Software Engineering

Department of Computing

Imperial College London

180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2AZ, UK.

Email: j.kramer at imperial.ac.uk

Phone: +44.20.7594.8271

Fax:   +44.20.7594.8282

Research Interests

Distributed computing: architecture description languages and support environments; distributed algorithms; dynamic configuration and self-organising systems.
Software architectures: Architectural Description Languages (ADL): structural concepts; underlying theory; application to the specification, analysis and construction of concurrent and distributed software systems.

Darwin Architecture for Concurrent and Distributed systems

Specification and design methods: structural specifications, design techniques and tools for the development of distributed software.
Behaviour analysis: compositional techniques for modelling and analysis of concurrent and distributed systems: Labelled Transition Systems (LTS) and Compositional Reachability Analysis (CRA); probabilistic models.

LTSA: LTS Analyser for Concurrent and Distributed systems

Requirements analysis: multiple perspectives (ViewPoints): inconsistency; requirements evolution, synthesis of behaviour models from scenarios and goals; experimental plugin version of LTSA

Full publications list

Book and Course Material

BOOK Concurrency: State Models and Java Programs ( Wiley 2006, 2nd Edition)

Concurrency Course: A twenty lecture course based on the book.

The material includes slides, Java applets and the LTSA analysis tool.

Exercises 2005: Unassessed exercises 1&2

Unassessed exercises 3

Assessed exercise 1

Unassessed exercises 4 & 5

Unassessed exercise 6

Unassessed exercise 7

Assessed exercise 2

Distributed Algorithms Course

New notes 2005: Asynchronous Algorithms

Asynchronous Resource Algorithms

Demos: a zip file containing models for several asynchronous algorithms

Logical time

Awards

ACM Fellow 2001, Association for Computing Machinery, New York.
Most Influential Paper Award 2003 at International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2003) for the paper from the ICSE meeting of 10 years previously judged to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of software engineering during the 10 years since its original publication. The award-winning paper is entitled "Expressing the Relationships Between Multiple Views in Requirements Specifications", and was co-authored by B. Nuseibeh and A. Finkelstein and published in the IEEE Proceedings of ICSE-93 held in Baltimore, USA, in May 1993.
ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award for 2005 for significant and lasting research contributions to software engineering (joint with Jeff Magee).

Best Paper awards:

o Kramer, J., and Cunningham, R.J., "Towards a Notation for the Functional Design of Distributed Processing Systems", (IEEE Int. Conf. on Parallel Processing, 1978), 69-76. Award for the Most Original Paper.

o Russo, A. Miller, R., Nuseibeh, B. and Kramer, J., “An abductive approach for analysing event-based requirements specifications”,
(International Conference on Logic Programming Copenhagen, Denmark, July 29th - August 1st, 2002). Best Applications Paper Award.

Conferences (2006/07)

Invited Keynotes talks

· 6th IEEE International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2006), Beijing, China on 26--28 October 2006.

· ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA ’06), Portland, Maine, July 2006.

· IEEE DSGrid2006 Workshop, Distributed Simulation on the Grid, CCGrid Singapore, May 2006

· Programme Co-Chair for IEEE Israeli Software Engineering Conference (SwSTE'07), Herzlia, October 2007.

· PC member of 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2007), Minneapolis, May 2007.

· Program Board of RE'07, the 15^thIEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, Delhi, India, October 2007.

· Chair for Software Engineering: Achievements and Challenges Track of 28^th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2006), Shanghai, May 2006.

· PC member of 21^st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2006), Tokyo, September 2006.

· PC member of 14^th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE ’06), Portland, November 2006.

Impact Project: ACM SIGSOFT study of the impact of software engineering research on software engineering practice.

Publications Editor

Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE): Editor in Chief (2006 - )

Research Studies Press: Series Editor for books on "Advanced Software Development" (distributed by Wiley).
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) : Associate editor and member of the editorial board (1995-2001)

Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Distributed Computing

The Skeleton in the Software Cupboard

One of the ways in which traditional engineers cope with the design of large and complex systems is to build models, simplified representations of aspects of the real world. These models are used to check particular properties of the system and its environment. Software engineers have also adopted this approach, but tend to disagree about the role of modelling, the form of the models, and the means of relating different models to the software system. For many distributed systems, software architecture can provide a unifying framework for these concerns.

Software architecture is the overall structure of a system in terms of its constituent components and their interconnections. It can be used to provide the "skeleton" upon which to flesh out the particular details of concern. For analysis, we can associate behavioural descriptions with the components and reason about the behaviour of systems composed from these components according to the architecture. For system construction, we can associate implementations with the components of the architecture. Systems developed in this way have an explicit structural skeleton which, being shared, helps to maintain consistency between the system and the various elaborated models.

16^th December 1997, Department of Computing, Imperial College.

Vote of Thanks: Prof. Carlo Ghezzi, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano.