Resources

Associate Professor Tony Clear served as the opponent for the defence of doctoral candidate Kristina von Hausswolff at Sweden's Uppsala University. UPCERG member Kristina's thesis aimed to bridge the gap between theory and practice in learning to program.

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A paper titled ‘FLASc: A Formal Algebra for Labeled Property Graph Schema’, by Dr Chandan Sharma and Dr Roopak Sinha, has been accepted in the Automated Software Engineering Journal (Q2). The paper is at printing stage and will be published shortly.

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A SERL team has received a grant from ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education for a project that aims to share SERL members' insights into the education of future software professionals and industry collaborations in their preparation for practice.

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Software Innovation NZ’s members (including Jim, Tony and Steve from SERL) recently made a submission to the Digital Strategy for Aotearoa Discussion Document. It highlights the need for strong domestic software development capability, with particular focus on Women, Māori, and Pasifika.

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Priyanka Antil has received the ECMS SDRA Summer Research Scholarship for her doctoral research, Portfolio level Global Agile Requirements Prioritization, co-supervised with Dr. Ramesh Lal—a tax-free stipend of NZ$ 4,000 per student. Congratulations to Priyanka and her supervisors.

Awais Tanveer successfully defended his PhD thesis titled: “Techniques for Developing Secure-by-design Industrial Control Software”, on 4th November, 2021. Awais is currently working as a software developer at Oracle New Zealand, has several years of experience developing communication security applications, and is an avid supporter of open-source software hoping to further develop the artifacts produced in his research as an open-source initiative.
His supervisors were  Assoc. Prof. Roopak Sinha,  Prof. Stephen MacDonell, and  Dr. Matthew Kuo.

A paper titled: “Modelling Influence in Software Ecosystems: Navigating a New Frontier” has been published in IEEE Software, resulting from the work conducted under the collaborative RSNZ Catalyst Leaders funded project, with Professor Daniela Damian.

Paper Project site

PhD student Ben Denham has had his research paper, titled “Gain-Some-Lose-Some: Reliable Quantification Under General Dataset Shift” accepted at IEEE ICDM 2021. This work is co-authored with Prof. Edmund Lai, A/Prof. Roopak Sinha and Prof. M. Asif Naeem (NUCES, Pakistan).

Slides Presentation

Barry Dowdeswell successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Diagnostic Belief-desire-intention Agents for Distributed Iec 61499 Fault Diagnosis”, on 19 October, 2021. Barry holds a bachelor’s in Chemistry from the University of Auckland and a master’s in Computer and Information Sciences from AUT. He completed his doctoral studies at AUT under the supervision of Associate Professor Roopak Sinha, Professor Stephen Macdonell, and Dr Jennifer Gibb (University of Waikato).

If you're an NZ developer, we welcome your response to this survey as part of a collaborative research project supported by Catalyst: Leaders funding. It aims to collect data from software developers and organisations that develop on and for software platforms in New Zealand.

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This year's John Hughes Distinguished Service Award goes to Steve MacDonell from AUT.

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Chandan Sharma successfully defended his PhD thesis titled: “Design of Formal Query Languages and Schemas for Graph Databases”, on 28 September, 2021. Chandan received his bachelor’s degree from Jaypee University of Information Technology, India in 2011 and his master’s degree from AUT in 2016. He then continued his doctoral studies at AUT under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Roopak Sinha, Dr. Alan Litchfield, Dr. Kenneth Johnson, and Prof. Edmund Lai.

An article titled “Building Maintainable Software using Abstraction Layering” co-authored by John Spray, A/Prof Roopak Sinha, Arnab Sen and Xingbin Cheng reports research conducted through a Datamars-AUT collaboration that shows that a novel Abstraction Layered Architecture produces commercial software that exhibits high maintainability in the long-term.

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Master’s student Gilad Itzkovitch and his supervisor Matthew Kuo’s paper, titled “Context Aware Compression for Environmental Edge Devices using LPWAN” has been accepted to IECON2021 conference. It explores techniques to minimize the power consumption of edge devices by examining various compression algorithms suited for resource-contained IoT devices through a novel switch algorithm.

IECON2021 website

Dr Robert Wellington joins the SERL lab with his Human Computer Interaction (HCI) group, which is a good fit with software development and the increasing emphasis on the usability of software artefacts. Robert’s focus is on supporting research into HCI at all levels of study.

The group pursues a philosophical focus on putting users first, promoting authentic usability study processes, and engaging users meaningfully.

Associate Professor Tony Clear will assume the role of director of SERL, while Associate Professor Jacqueline Whalley and Professor MacDonell will take on co-director roles. SERL will continue to be led through a co-operative and team-based approach, as is the nature of the lab.

Our people Our research

Intern student Smit Patel and A/Prof. Roopak Sinha’s paper “Combining Holistic Source Code Representation with Siamese Neural Networks for Detecting Code Clones” will be presented at IFIP ICTSS in November. It explores the detection of code clones in software code bases. Code clones affect software maintenance costs that already account for a majority of expenditure in software development.

Github ICTSS website

The ACM/IEEE CC2020 Task Force worked on a project resulting in the recently published report Computing Curricula 2020: Paradigms for Global Computing Education.

SERL's Associate Professor Tony Clear gave presentations at ITx Innovation Days in July on one of the next stages of the work, on curriculum visualisations.

ITx website Report

Dr Subash Humagain received his PhD degree on 29 July. His thesis, “Intelligent Dynamic Route Optimization and Road Pre-emption System for On-Road Emergency Services”, was supervised by Associate Professor Roopak Sinha, Professor Edmund Lai and Dr Prakash Ranjtikar (UoA).

Subash is aiming to pursue industrial R&D work in data analytics and transportation.

Muhammad Tariq successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Effort Estimation in Agile Development” on 27 July 2021. Tariq was supervised by Professor Stephen MacDonell and Jim Buchan. Congratulations to Tariq and his supervisors.

Dong-hyun Lee’s co-authored research article titled “Predicting the outcomes of a Korean national accreditation system for higher education institutions, IEQAS: a method using disclosure data for outsiders” has been accepted for publication in Asia Pacific Education Review (SSCI, Q2 - Higher Education), Seoul National University (issue date 1 December 2021).

Don has also been appointed as a two-year-member of the Board of Directors of Tourism Institute of Northeast Asia.

Barry Dowdeswell’s research article, titled “Architecting an Agent-Based Fault Diagnosis Engine for IEC 61499 Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems”, co-authored with Roopak Sinha and Stephen MacDonell, has been accepted for publication in the MDPI journal Future Internet. It will appear as part of their Special Issue Modern Trends in Multi-Agent Systems.

• Read the Special Issue

Jim Buchan has recently been featured in AgileIT interview conducted by Luke Pivac as part of Agilists in Auckland series of blogs.

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Subash Humagain successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Intelligent Dynamic Route Optimization and Road Pre-emption System for On-road Emergency Services” on 16 June ’21. Subash was supervised by Roopak Sinha, Edmund Lai and Prakash Ranjitkar (Auckland University).

Nidhi Gowdra successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Exploring entropy-based optimization methods to increase Neural Network model training effectiveness” on 3 June 2021. Nidhi was supervised by Roopak Sinha, Wei Qi Yan and Stephen MacDonell.

Chandan Sharma’s research article, titled “Practical and Comprehensive Formalisms for Modeling Contemporary Graph Query Languages” co-authored with Roopak Sinha and Kenneth Johnson has been accepted in Elsevier’s Information Systems Journal (h-index 85).

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Nidhi Gowdra’s research article, titled “Mitigating severe over-parameterization in deep convolutional neural networks through forced feature abstraction and compression with an entropy-based heuristic” co-authored with Roopak Sinha, Stephen MacDonell and Wei Qi Yan, has been accepted at Elsevier’s Pattern Recognition Journal (h-index 210).

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A recent journal-first presentation, titled “Do Scaling Agile Frameworks Address Global Software Development Risks? An Empirical Study”  was given at the ICSSP/ICGSE conference as a co-located event at ICSE 2021 on 19 May 2021. The paper is by Sarah Beecham and co-authored with Tony Clear, Ramesh Lal and John Noll.

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Dr Don Lee is completing a one-year research project, primarily in response to COVID-19’s impact on airline operations, at the AUT Software Engineering Research Laboratory, mentored by Professor Stephen MacDonell.

Dr Don Lee's Academic profile

For his Master of Philosophy research, Arnab Sen is working with a company that is an industry leader in innovative software architecture. Support from the Embedded Software group is helping him achieve his research goals.

Read Arnab's story

After investigating an innovative approach to software architecture for his Master of Computer and Information Sciences, Xingbin Cheng has now been hired by the company he collaborated with for his research.

Read Xingbin's story

Jim presented a research paper titled “Applying Distributed Cognition Theory to Agile Requirements Engineering”. This paper was presented in the Requirement Engineering: Foundations for Software Quality (REFSQ) conference.

Awais Tanveer has had a paper accepted in the Q1-ranked IEEE TII journal. The paper proposes a novel design abstraction called “secure links” which allow software developers to include communication security mechanisms into industrial control applications while ensuring high code readability and maintainability.

Barry Dowdeswell, a PhD student who studies fault diagnostics for industrial cyber-physical systems had a paper accepted to the Q1-ranked Journal of Systems and Software. The paper surveys the state of the art of fault identification and management across the aerospace, automotive and industrial control domains.

Publication

The EMSOFT group hosted a talk, titled “Autonomy in Energy Systems Automation - systems engineering perspective” by Dr. Chen-Wei Yang from LTU, Sweden.

More information

In his presentation "Successfully on boarding a new team member – good luck or good support", Jim Buchan talked about some contemporary team on boarding techniques used in the software industry and highlighted challenges in current practices.

Callaghan Innovation

Programme (EIS Everywhere)

Dr. Kenneth Johnson recently presented his work on Parametric model checking at University of Waikato. This presentation was based on a paper titled “Efficient Parametric Model Checking Using Domain Knowledge” published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Research paper

Presentation

Subash Humagain, a Ph.D. student, had a research paper accepted in “Transport Reviews” - a very high ranked journal. The publication titled “A systematic review of route optimisation and pre-emption methods for emergency vehicles”  reports the current state of the art in intelligent transportation systems.

Publication