2000 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2000)

Keynote Address

The Keynote Address for the 2000 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing ( SAC 2000) will be presented by Professor Carlo Ghezzi of the Politecnico di Milano.

Rethinking the software process

The talk will address the historical evolution of software process research, will try to identify the current state of the art and will identify directions for future research. The attention to software processes dates back to the early 70's. when software engineers realized that product quality depends on disciplined and systematic development processes. Several approaches were proposed and experimented, but most of the software process work remained in an informal stage until the late 80's. From then on, research began to concentrate more on the issue of understanding, analyzing, and formalizing software processes. The main goal became automating software processes via process-centered environments. The myth of process automation, however, will be challenged in the talk. Software processes are human-centered systems, i.e., systems were people work and cooperate in creative design tasks. Environments supporting these processes, unlike conventional workflow systems supporting more clerical activities, should enforce systematic processes without overconstraining humans. The talk will discuss how the requirements of modern human-centered systems affect the design of support environments, and will conclude by identifying a number of open research directions.

The Speaker

Carlo Ghezzi received his Dr.Eng degree in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where he now holds the position of Full Professor of Computer Science. Presently, he is also a Guest Professor at USI, the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Prior to that, he taught at the Universities of Padova (Italy) and North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). He has been a visitor at UCLA and UCSB (USA), ESLAI (Argentina), the University of Klagenfurt and the Technical University of Vienna--TUW (Austria). His research interests are in software engineering and programming languages. He is currently particularly interested in the theoretical, methodological, and technological issues involved in developing network-wide applications, with special focus on supporting geographically distributed cooperation among people. He is a co-author of over 120 scientific papers and 8 books. Among these, Programming Language Concepts (co-author M. Jazayeri), J. Wiley and Sons, New York, NY, 3rd Edition, 1997; Fundamentals of Software Engineering (co-authors M. Jazayeri and D. Mandrioli), Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1991; and Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science (co-author D. Mandrioli), J. Wiley and Sons, New York, NY, 1987. He has been Program Chair or Co-Chair of several international conferences, including the European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC-2), the IEEE Workshop on Software Specification and Design (IWSSD-6), the Intl. Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-14). He will be General Chair of ICSE in the year 2000. He is a member of the editorial boards of Trends in Software, Theory and Practice of Object Systems, Software Process Improvement and Practice, and Annals of Software Engineering. Carlo Ghezzi is an ACM Fellow.