updated July 2004..
The projects listed here are some of the projects in which I am interested. I do not have funding available for these at this time. They are listed just in case you are interested in working with me. These projects come in a variety of sizes, some are appropriate for undergraduates, some are for Master's projects, some are Master's thesis, and some could be PhD dissertation topics. Contact me if you are interested in any of these.
In June 2004 the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn and begin a six-to-eight year tour of the planet. During that time it is expected to collect a great deal of data. We are currently working on software tools to assist the space scientists involved in research on planetary rings as they analyze this data. Data analysis is expected to continue for several decades.
Specifically, we are developing CASVU, a tool using the programming language IDL to display images from Cassini, predicted locations of stars, planets, and rings, and to analyze data in images. The data analysis is being used (in Spring 2004) to analyze images to assess hazards in the orbit insertion.
In 2003, student Trevor Morgan wrote a simple database application to help his project team keep track of software designs for CS4311, Software Engineering Design and Implementation. Later that year, several students (Javier Vasquez, Heidi Curry, and Gabe Marquez) designed and implemented a production version of this tool. The tool facilitates the CRC design method. Several upgrades to this tool would be useful, such as integrating the tool with Rational Rose, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Word, and testing tools; enhancing the tool with a design advisor that analyzes the quality of the design; and the addition of design pattern templates. We would like to assess whether this tool actually facilitates the creation of better designs.
We are currently involved in the development of the GEON Grid, a geoinformatics computing grid for distributed data and computational services. There are many active areas of research including ontologies, integrated web services, service discovery, requirements engineering, software assurance, data assurance, and distributed computing environments.
The research group is actively engaged in researching runtime monitoring approaches to software assurance. DynaMICs is a dynamic runtime monitoring system under development in the UTEP Department of Computer Science that allows domain experts to specify system constraints. DynaMICs takes these constraints and automatically instruments program code to test constraints at runtime. The research areas are in requirements elicitation and specification, requirements validation, program synthesis, static analysis, and tracing.
ACL2 is an inductive theorem prover created and maintained by J Moore and Matt Kaufmann at UT Austin. It is used to prove correctness theorems about software. We would like to use ACL2 to prove properties of software that we create. For example, we would like to prove that our algorithm for converting CFGs to path expressions is correct. We would also like to prove that our approach to instrument code correctly identifies all the appropriate places for constraint tests. In particular, we are interested in proving that the HATS classloader for the Sandia Secure Processor (SSP) is correct. HATS is the High Assurance Transformation System. The SSP is a chip designed for embedded systems.
In 2001, Master's student Manuel Nieto wrote an interface to the simulator for the 68HC11 microprocessor. That simulator and processor are currently being used in CS3432, Computer Architecture I here at UTEP. There are a variety of upgrades to that simulator and interface that would make it useful to ECE as well as enhance its capabilities here. These include adding interrupts, modeling the serial communications port, and building an interface to support timers and IO ports.
Amphion is a deductive synthesis system. Amphion/NAIF currently generates Fortran 77 programs to solve problems that arise in deep space mission planning and data analysis. Amphion/NAIF has not been maintained since approximately 2000. The CASVU program (see NASA RINGS) is being written in IDL. We would like to update Amphion/NAIF to incorporate many new functions in the NAIF toolkit and to generate C, C++, and IDL code in addition to Fortran.