Birds-of-a-Feather Meeting on

Web Portals for Collaborative Cyber-Physical Systems
Software Research

Hosted by CPS Week 2011

When/Where: This one hour meeting will be held 5pm-6pm on Monday, April 11.  The complete schedule can be found here.

Abstract:

Consider a researcher or graduate student interested in building new technologies and tools to improve software and systems engineering.  While the researchers strive to understand and incorporate deep, specific knowledge about a problem domain, they typically have little to no contact with engineers working real, large software systems programs, making it hard for them to get the information they need. To showcase their research results, researchers thus have little choice but to make up data artifacts using their imagination, and design and conduct experiments that are abstract and typically small-scale representations of the challenges faced by real programs.

Now imagine an online portal dedicated to providing researchers with freely available, realistic, at-scale data artifacts, along with experimentation facilities that allow engineers to use the artifacts to reproduce challenges faced by real programs.  Imagine also the researchers using the same data artifacts to demonstrate how their specific technology solves a piece of the challenge.  Collaboration facilities that allow program engineers and researchers to discuss and refine assumptions, document experimental results for other future researchers, are all free and openly available to all researchers.  The vision of such a portal is shared by diverse organizations such as OSD and AFRL, sponsors of the SPRUCE project, and NSF, supporting the CPS-Virtual Organization project (CPS-VO).  Both groups are now closely collaborating. 

The purpose of this meeting is to

(a)         provide an overview of these portals.  
(b)         solicit views and ideas from the community for these efforts

Intended Audience: This meeting is intended for all researchers and practitioners of cyber-physical systems that are engaged in software and/or systems integration aspects of those systems.