Keynote 1: December 18, 2006

Title: Quality Wave in Light of The Nano Development
Speaker: Professor Way Kuo

Abstract: Nano technologies are a driving force for strong economic growth in the world, and some analysts predict that its impact will bring to us the next industrial revolution. In the 2005 National Academy's publication of Keck Futures Initiative, reliability is cited as the key element of the success of nano fabrication and manufacturing. In this keynote speech, we will address both the historical review of the neno technologies ever since the industrial revolution and recent development, particularly those events which have great impacts on quality and computing. Some new challenges will be discussed as well.

Biography: Way Kuo is University Distinguished Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Kuo is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, R.O.C., and International Academy for Quality. He has co-authored five textbooks and currently serves as the Editor of IEEE Transactions on Reliability.

Keynote 2: December 19, 2006

Title: "Challenges in Dependability of Future Networked Systems"
Speaker: Professor Takashi Nanya
 

Abstract: As networked systems pervade every aspect of the modern information society, we are faced with serious threats to dependability due to  problems caused by accidental events such as human mistakes and physical malfunctions or by intentional behavior being either malicious or non-malicious. In this talk, we discuss major challenges and give views of future directions in research on the dependability of evolving networked systems toward an advanced  information society.

Biography: Takashi NANYA is a Professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), University of Tokyo, and a Senior Fellow of the Japan Science and Technology Agency. From 2001 to 2004, he was the Director of the RCAST and a Councilor of the University of Tokyo. He is also a Professor Emeritus of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and a Member of the Science Council of Japan. He received his B.E. and M.E. in mathematical engineering and information physics from the University of Tokyo in 1969 and 1971, respectively, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1978. He worked for NEC from 1971 to 1981. He was an Associate Professor from 1981 to 1989 and a Professor from 1989 to 1996 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In 1996, he joined the University of Tokyo where he has been a Professor since then. His research interests include dependable computing, computer architecture, VLSI design and asynchronous computing. He is a Fellow of IEEE and IEICE. He currently serves as Vice-chair of IFIP TC-10.
 

Keynote 3: December 20, 2006

TITLE -- Code Coverage: The Missing Link Between Software Testing and Software Reliability?

SPEAKER -- Professor Michael R. Lyu
Computer Science & Engineering Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT --
While hardware testing and reliability techniques are closely related, software testing and reliability approaches were developed independently, sometimes with conflicting principles. Software testers spend their most testing efforts in exceptional test cases, while software reliability engineers require software to be tested under a normal operational profile. Software testers are interested in knowing how software testing covers the development requirements. Software reliability engineers are interested in how software reliability is perceived from customer views. Software testers do not trust numbers. Software reliability engineers insist software quality cannot be an objective attribute without creditable reliability measures.

The main issues in software testing are the design and evaluation of effective test cases, and relating software testing with the resulting reliability. Code coverage was proposed as an estimator for testing effectiveness, But it remains a controversial metric in linking testing with reliability. In this talk, we focus our research questions regarding the measure of code coverage on testing effectiveness under various testing strategies, and evaluate the influence of code coverage to software reliability measurement. We conduct experiments to investigate the relationship between code coverage and fault detection capability under different testing profiles. From our experimental data, code coverage is merely a moderate indicator for fault detection regarding the overall testing strategies examined on the whole test set. However, it is clearly a good fault detection estimator with exceptional test cases. Moreover, we analyze the effects of different coverage metrics and how coverage can be used to in reliability measurement, and establish a new reliability model incorporating both testing time and code coverage. New research directions in software testing and reliability will also be given.
 

Biography: Michael R. Lyu received the B.S. in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, the M.S. in computer engineering from University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Ph.D. in computer science from University of California, Los Angeles. He is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bellcore, and Bell Labs; and taught at the University of Iowa. His research interests include software reliability engineering, software fault tolerance, distributed systems, and multimedia applications. He has published over 250 papers in these areas. Professor Lyu initiated the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), and was Program Chair for ISSRE'1996, Program Co-Chair for WWW10 and SRDS'2005, and General Chair for ISSRE'2001 and PRDC'2005. He is the editor-in-chief for two book volumes: Software Fault Tolerance (Wiley, 1995), and the Handbook of Software Reliability Engineering (IEEE and McGraw-Hill, 1996). He has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Reliability, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Journal of Information Science and Engineering, and Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability. Professor Lyu is an IEEE Fellow and an AAAS Fellow, for his contributions to software reliability engineering and software fault tolerance.