DCU/LERO

Link to partner web site

www.lero.ie

Company introduction

LERO (participant through Dublin College University)

Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, is funded by Science Foundation Ireland is a collaboration of academic and industrial partners. Lero researches, develops and validates theories, technologies, methods and notations that help make software production more predictable and more efficient and the software itself more reliable, more flexible and more easily changed. Lero has established 5 research areas in which to focus its research activities; Autonomic Systems, Globally Distributed Software Development, Software Product Lines, Service and Aspect-based Component Architectures and Mathematics Applied to Software Engineering.

Modern society has become reliant on software systems for many mission-critical and life-critical functions. Lero is working on increasing the understanding of the abstract mathematical principles underlying software. Lero seeks to harness this understanding in order to improve and apply mathematical approaches with the goal to integrating them into the full software development lifecycle. In isolation, these formalisms are of little practical value unless they are integrated into a design methodology that covers the complete development cycle from analysis, design, development and verification. These design methodologies have to be "designer-friendly". The researchers in Lero have been involved in several European projects, such as INSYDE, ACCA, AOSD, GloSS, CALIBRE, COSPA, and OPAALS.

Key personnel

Dr. David Sinclair has approximately 20 years experience, in both industry and academia, in the design and verification of embedded and distributed systems. While in industry he was the technical lead on several industrial R&D projects. Since returning to academia he has focussed his research on the design and verification of embedded and distributed systems. He is the research area leader for Lero's activities in Mathematics Applied to Software Engineering. Dr. Sinclair's research interests are in the design and verification of distributed systems, particularly on the use of formal mathematical logics to specify and verify distributed systems. He has developed approaches using various formalisms for the specification and verification of mission critical distributed systems as typified by communications and security protocols. Dr. Sinclair has been involved in several national and international projects that address integrating formalisms into design methodologies, where the goal has been to develop domain appropriate methodologies to aid a designer in bringing a design from initial requirements specification to a formal model. Dr. Sinclair is a reviewer for several leading journals, such as Information and Software Technologies, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, IET Computers and Digital Technologies and The Computer Journal. Dr. Sinclair has been a reviewer and evaluator for the Irish and UK funding agencies as well as the European Commission.

Involvement/Role in the project