*GMU Software Engineering Seminar Series 
<http://cs.gmu.edu/%7Esmalek/seminar.html>*

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*Date:* Wed, 09/30/2009
*Time:* 12 – 1pm
*Location:* 4801 Engineering
Pizza will be served.
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*Title:* A Modeling Language for Activity-Oriented Composition of 
Service-Oriented Software Systems

*** a paper to be presented at ACM/IEEE 12th International Conference on 
Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems ***

*Speaker:* Naeem Esfahani <http://mason.gmu.edu/%7Enesfaha2/index.htm>

*Abstract*
The proliferation of smart spaces and emergence of new standards, such 
as Web Services, have paved the way for a new breed of software systems. 
The functional and QoS requirements of such software systems are often 
not known a priori at design-time, and even if they are, they may change 
at run-time. Unfortunately, the majority of existing software 
engineering techniques rely heavily on human reasoning and manual 
intervention, making them inapplicable for automatic composition of such 
software systems at run-time. Moreover, these approaches are primarily 
intended to be used by technically knowledgeable software engineers, as 
opposed to domain users. In this talk, we present Service Activity 
Schemas (SAS), an activity-oriented language for modeling software 
system’s functional and QoS requirements. SAS targets service-oriented 
software systems, and relies on an ontology to provide domain experts 
with modeling constructs that are intuitively understood. SAS forms the 
centerpiece of a framework intended for user-driven composition and 
adaptation of service-oriented software systems in a pervasive setting 
(SASSY).

*Bio*
Naeem Esfahani is a PhD candidate in Computer Science Department, 
Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering. He got his 
bachelor’s degrees on Computer Engineering with major of Software 
Engineering from University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. He also holds a 
Master of Science degree in Computer Engineering with major of Software 
Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. His 
current research mainly focuses on Software Architecture, Autonomic 
Computing, Model Driven Development, Pervasive Systems, and Software 
Development Processes.

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*Title:* On the Role of Features in Analyzing the Architecture of 
Self-Adaptive Software Systems

*** a paper to be presented at 4th International Workshop on Models at 
Runtime ***

*Speaker:* Ahmed Elkhodary

*Abstract*
In traditional software families, feature-orientation has been shown 
effective for bridging the semantic gap between a software system’s 
requirements and its architecture. Over the past few years, the 
emergence of self-adaptive software systems, which are significantly 
more challenging to build than traditional systems, has gained the 
attention of the software engineering research community. In this talk, 
we show that using features at runtime could alleviate some of the key 
challenges of building such systems. The underlying insights are that: 
(1) features allow representation of the engineer’s knowledge about some 
facets of the system that can be used to enhance the adaptation logic, 
and (2) features can serve as an abstraction to deal with the 
heterogeneity of the underlying architectural models, analytical 
algorithms, and implementation platforms. We describe the role of 
features in a self-adaptive framework that we have developed, entitled 
FeatUre-oriented Self-adaptatION (FUSION). We also report on our 
preliminary experience with FUSION that demonstrates the benefits of 
using features in different stages of self-adaptation.

*Bio*
Ahmed Elkhodary is a PhD student in Computer Science Department, 
Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering. He got his 
bachelor’s degrees in Computer Engineering from King Abdul-Aziz 
University, KSA. He also holds a Master of Science in Software 
Engineering from George Mason University. His current research mainly 
focuses on Software Architecture, Software Product Lines Engineering, 
Autonomic Computing, and Online Machine Learning.

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Sam Malek, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science

Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030-4444 U.S.A.

Phone: +1-703-993-1677

Email: [log in to unmask]

WWW: http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~smalek/