Professor Bernstein delivers his final IEEE Distinguished Visitor Lecture, Orlando, Fla., Dec. 8

Topic will be the present and future status of trustworthy software

HOBOKEN, N.J. — Stevens Institute of Technology Professor Lawrence Bernstein will deliver his 18th and final IEEE Distinguished Visitor Lecture to the Orlando Section Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society, on the topic "Trustworthy Software for Today and Tomorrow," December 8, 2008, at the University of Central Florida.

For information please contact the chapter chair, Ghaith Haddad, at haddad@ieee.org

"Much software engineering focuses on cost and schedule, especially schedule," says Bernstein, who is Distinguished Service Professor of Software Engineering in Stevens' School of Systems & Enterprises and the Department of Computer Science. "My view is that a shift is needed. The software engineer must make judgments or tradeoffs among the features the software provides, the time it will take to produce the software, the cost of producing the software, how easy it is to use and how reliable it is. Too often performance requirements only become an issue once the software is deployed. Rarely is trustworthiness considered. Not only must software designers consider how the software will perform they must account for consequences of failures. Trustworthiness encompasses this concern. The requirements must encompass the trustworthiness of the emerging system."

This talk presents principles of requirements engineering for trustworthy software intensive systems-of- systems. A process for getting to a quantitative and feasible set of software feature requirements is the theme. The approach is to deduce a Measurable Operational Value from a customer prospectus, establish feature sets, set priorities using a simplified quality function deployment approach, validate the feature packages with prototypes, and extend the prototypes to models.

The tutorial includes ways to estimate staffing, schedules and reliability and evaluating the resulting product with ICED-T metrics. It is based on Bernstein's published book, TRUSTWORTHY SYSTEMS THROUGH QUANTITATIVE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press; September 2005; 0-471-69691-9.

The IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitors Program (DVP) was initiated in 1971 by Dr. Stephen Yau. It is a popular offering of first-quality speakers serving IEEE Computer Society professional and student chapters. The DVP owes its success to the many volunteers and staff members of the Computer Society who generously contribute their time and talent. Each year, the program features new Distinguished Visitors (speakers) and new topics, to help maintain renewed interest even by those chapters that have already taken advantage of the program.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value. Stevens offers baccalaureates, master's and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens' graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.

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