Lori A. Clarke - US grants

This award provides support for a portion of the work of the Arcadia project. Arcadia is a major, joint research effort the aim of which is to gain fundamental understandings about desirable architectures for the integration of software tools into environments and particularly in support of software testing, analysis and evaluation. Arcadia is an experimental research project which aims to gain these understandings through the creation and experimental evaluation of an actual environment prototype--Arcadia-1. A key innovative feature of the approach being taken by Arcadia is to consider software processes to be items of software themselves and to view an environment as a mechanism for specifying, compiling and interpreting these processes, using software tools and software workers as interpretation primitives. Work at the University of Massachusetts on the Arcadia project will focus on two important aspects of software development environments, namely object management and analysis tools. The object management mechanisms will be a central feature of the Arcadia environment architecture. On the one hand, it will serve to organize and orchestrate the myriad pieces of a software project being created and maintained by users of an environment. In addition, it will constitute the primary structuring and integration mechanism for the environment itself, since all the tools and information structures comprised by an environment can and should be viewed as objects subject to management. Analysis tools and their integration are an important focus of Arcadia, both as a test case for the environment architecture's extensibility and integration capabilities and as a contribution to expanding the power and usefulness that environments offer to their users. This project will focus on two classes of analysis tools: software testing tools and tools for analyzing concurrent and distributed systems. Major experimental research efforts are needed to provide basic understandings of overall software development environments. The Arcadia project is a significant effort toward achieving those understandings.

The Fourteenth International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 14) is scheduled to be held in Melbourne, Australia, May 11-15, 1992. Tony Montgomery, from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, is general chair and Lori A. Clarke, from the University of Massachusetts, and Carlo Ghezzi, from the Politecnico de Milano, are Program co-chairs. The requested travel funds are to help defray the high cost of travel to Australia. Many researchers do not have funds to fully support such a trip. Travel funds from this grant would be distributed by the two ICSE 14 program chairs and a small subcommittee selected from the program committee members. All authors of papers and abstracts and panel speakers will be notified about the availability of travel funds and asked to submit an application if such funds are desired. Applications instructions will ask for information about current travel funds and for a current curricula vita or resume. Priority will be given to authors of papers and to young developing researchers.

This research will evaluate a generative approach to creating families of processes, by generating families of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) processes, and evaluating them through use at the National Mediation Board (NMB). The generative approach will be guided by NMB specifications of process goals, which will vary in emphasis according to different weightings of both tangible goals, such as resolving a specific conflict, and such nontangible goals as empowerment and relationship-building. The process families will be generated by binding different combinations of process concerns, such as coordination, agent behaviors, and artifact flows, into a high-level metaprocess framework. The generated process instances will also include specified instrumentation and measurement vehicles. This will facilitate the evaluation of the processes by NMB and project researchers and will form the foundation for evaluation of the overall generative approach. This approach will require a process definition language that features clear separation of concerns. An example is the Little-JIL process definition language, developed at UMass, which will be used as the basis for this research. The project will add to understanding of process generation and process technology in general, while also creating useful processes for the NMB, and a superior framework for social science experimentation with dispute resolution processes as well as processes in general. The project team includes computer science researchers, an ODR expert, dispute resolution researchers, and representatives from the NMB. The team has conducted successful NSF-funded research on a previous project, whose results indicate the need for the research proposed here.

Intellectual Merit: This project continues the exploration of the value of using software engineering perspectives and technology to deal with processes as rigorously definable objects. The main issue addressed here is the management of families of processes. Previous research indicates that organizations like NMB require families of processes, rather than a single process, and that such processes may not always be aimed at producing a single product nor one that is tangible. Use of a process definition language featuring clean separation of concerns seems to be a promising way to address these needs, and that approach will be pursued and evaluated in this research, thus making an important contribution to understanding the formal nature of processes. A process generation framework will be built and used to generate real ODR processes that will be used and evaluated by the NMB. The rigor and precision of these processes, and their incorporation of vehicles for evaluation, will facilitate the comparison of processes that differ in precisely documented ways. This will be an important contribution to social science research, supporting the ability of social scientists to perform precise experimentation with processes, with ODR processes being used as a first example.

Broader Impact: The ODR processes provided will be of considerable value to the NMB in a number of ways. The processes will improve NMB's effectiveness in dealing with disputes in the airline and railroad industries. They will also serve as an aid that NMB can use to train new personnel. The clarity and precision of the processes will render them suitable subjects for ongoing discussion and evaluation, leading to improvements in conflict resolution effectiveness. Moreover, success at the NMB will demonstrate the applicability of these ideas and approaches to the dozens of other government agencies responsible for dispute resolution.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst proposes to develop a Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE) to design and carry out comprehensive programs that address under representation in information technology (IT) education and the workforce. CAITE will focus on women and minorities in groups that are underrepresented in the Massachusetts innovation economy; that is, economically, academically, and socially disadvantaged residents. The project will pilot a series of outreach programs supported by educational pathways in three regions (one rural, one suburban, and one urban). The project will include work with high school teachers, staff, and counselors. CAITE will identify best practices and disseminate, deploy, extend and institutionalize these best practices statewide and nationally. Community colleges are the centerpiece of CAITE because of the central role they play in reaching out to underserved populations and in serving as a gateway to careers and further higher education. This project will build a broad alliance built on its leadership in and partnership with the Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative (CITI), the Boston Area Advanced Technological Education Center (BATEC), regional Louis Stokes Alliances and NSF EGEP programs, and other partnerships and initiatives focused on information technology education and STEM pipeline issues.

NSF Proposals 0820198/0820138

Title: Process-Centered, Analysis-Driven System Development Applied to Human-Intensive Medical Processes

PIs: Lori Clarke, Philip Henneman, George Avrunin, Elizabeth Henneman, and Leon Osterweil

This project presents a new approach to developing human-intensive systems in which the coordination among human participants, hardware devices, and application software systems are specified in an executable, process-definition language. Process definitions are subjected to rigorous analysis in order to detect defects and evaluate proposed improvements. Such validated process definitions can then be used to drive simulations and train process participants. The proposed approach is to be evaluated by developing a process support environment that is then used to define and analyze medical processes. Medical processes provide a particularly good evaluation domain as they are human-intensive, involve diverse software applications and hardware devices, and are both safety critical and error prone. Separating and rigorously analyzing the coordination aspects of complex, human-intensive systems represent a paradigm shift from current development practices. This approach provides a strong technical and methodological basis for the engineering of human-intensive systems, leading to systems that are scalable, understandable, and able to amplify human efficacy and control. Finally, this process-centered approach has the potential to improve the quality and reduce the cost of medical care.

The University of Massachusetts proposes an expansion of the Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE). CAITE ? an alliance of three campuses of the University of Massachusetts and six community colleges, that aims to increase participation and retention along the high-school-to-community-college-to-four-year-to-graduate-school pipeline. Much of the focus is on community colleges because of the central role they play in reaching out to underserved populations and in serving as a gateway to careers and further higher education. CAITE aims to make academic IT pathways attractive and nurturing, and to ensure that students -- particularly women and underrepresented minorities -- are adequately prepared to enter them. This extension brings in a fourth region and new regional partners. In addition, it strengthens and re-focuses the work of the existing CAITE Alliance, forging stronger direct ties to other BPC projects, modifying outreach and pathway strategies based on lessons learned from the original grant, and developing new interventions designed to increase participation and retention. The extension of CAITE will be data-driven, informed by best practices developed locally and nationally, and focused on replication and dissemination.

One of the Federal government's missions is to act as an unbiased mediator in the resolution of disputes. One avenue for achieving resolution is the court system. There are other avenues, though, such as the National Mediation Board (NMB) which is required to mediate labor disputes in the railway industry.

Building on a three-year collaborative technical project between NSF and NMB, this workshop will develop a broad technical and socio/legal research agenda for on-line dispute resolution and labor negotiation/mediation in Federal transporation agencies. In addition to a report to be widely distributed, the event will allow a forum for a broad selection of interested parties to begin forming a community of interest. Attendees will include lawyers, transportation experts, and computer scientists from academia, industry and Federal agencies that have mediation responsibilities.

This project is developing and evaluating the application of iterative process improvement technology to assure the privacy, security, reliability, and trustworthiness of elections, which are the very cornerstone of democracy. The focus of the project is to locate mismatches between existing voting systems and the processes that are currently using them in the conduct of elections. These mismatches can result in vulnerabilities or inaccuracy in elections. This project demonstrates how to remediate such vulnerabilities through the use of iterative process improvement. The methodology uncovers vulnerabilities by modeling processes and examining how discrepancies between the characteristics of these processes and the behaviors of voting systems that are used by the processes can lead to such vulnerabilities. In this way, this project is making a novel and important contribution to defending one of the most critical processes of democracy.

The project tests the results on the election processes and systems of Yolo County. Part of the research is to model that county's processes using the process definition language, and examining what these processes require and expect from the voting systems they use. The existing voting systems can then be examined to determine whether they meet the requirements and expectations of the processes using them. Where mismatches occur, the vulnerabilities created by such mismatches can be assessed, improvements suggested, and the methodology can show how the suggested improvements address the mismatches and remove the vulnerabilities.

A mix of financially needy community college transfer students and beginning graduate students including those in the Northeast Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate majoring in Computer Science, Computer Systems and Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Industrial and Mechanical Engineering are receiving annual scholarships of $8,000. A total of twenty two students, approximately eighteen of whom are undergraduates receive support for two years while three or four graduate students receive one year support with the possibility of a second year. In many cases, the graduate students are those who need some additional studies beyond those taken as an undergraduate to qualify for full acceptance into a graduate program. The project builds on previous CSEMS and S-STEM awards.

This project will develop and evaluate software to support people engaged in online social deliberation, especially as it relates to dispute resolution and collaborative inquiry. The software will model and monitor deliberative processes skills while people are either in collaboration or involved in settling disputes. Applications will be in three domains that already support online conversations: 1) online dispute resolution (e.g., eBay and the U.S. National Mediation Board); 2) collaborative learning in open-ended inquiry learning environments; and 3) dialog and deliberation on civic and ethical issues. The project will scaffold situations, adding structure or focusing attention on social processes, support improvement of individual skills, and facilitate a. Wisdom of crowds that enables participants to produce improved results. This project involves faculty across five departments: legal studies, psychology, political science, computer science and education.

Intellectual Merit. This research advances social issues (collaboration, dispute resolution, and critical thinking) and computation techniques (online dispute resolution, argumentation and collaboration). It furthers research into building social communities, explores issues of coaching and collaboration and develops evaluation tools for measuring the effect of online support.

Broader Societal Impact. This project advances the understanding of online human-human communication. It will enable more people to access social deliberative tools, promote interest in discussion among more people and improve the quality of on-line disputes as well as collaborations. The project lays the groundwork for more intelligent communication in online communities, creates new understandings of the complexities of collaboration and produces new modes of synergistic online discussions.

This project explores process composition tools as applied to elections, concentrating particularly on mail-in and Internet voting. This includes exploration of how to compose systems from pre-analyzed process components, how to analyze the vulnerability of these systems to attacks, and how to guarantee that important security properties are ensured for the resulting composed system. The underlying processes represent aspects of national and local elections, their composition produces an election process, and analysis of the composition gives insight into potential errors or attacks on the election.

Elections are human-intensive processes, processes that directly involve humans in important decision-making and coordination activities, including their interactions with hardware and software components. Providing an approach for formally reasoning about human participation extends current security work. The project also breaks new ground by exploring process-based approaches for modeling and defending against attacks.

The project works closely with government agencies at both the national and local levels to provide in-depth realistic evaluation of results.

Election officials in the U.S. can directly employ the results of this work to make U.S. election processes more verifiably secure, simpler, and easier to change as new technologies, laws, and regulations are imposed. Moreover the technologies developed in this project can be used in most human-intensive processes that have critical security concerns.

The research objective of this Advancing Health Services through System Modeling Research project is to develop and evaluate health information technology (IT) interfaces that can be used to guide healthcare providers in real-time as they complete the complex, error-prone blood transfusion process. The researchers will determine how the interfaces should be designed to best help individuals complete the process safely, and to effectively alert and guide individuals when process failures or exceptional situations arise. The researchers will develop and evaluate these interfaces using laboratory-based evaluations and experiments in a realistic clinical setting. This project will establish foundational principles for the design of real-time health IT-based process guidance systems that improve healthcare process safety and efficiency.

While health IT has the potential to guide individuals completing complex healthcare processes, it is often inflexible, forcing individuals to perform non-ideal, inefficient, and potentially unsafe processes. This project has the potential to dramatically reduce medical errors by designing health IT interfaces that allow individuals flexibility in the way they complete processes, yet provide enough guidance to maintain a high level of process safety. While this project focuses on the blood transfusion process, the fundamental findings will be generalizable to other complex healthcare processes. Through this project, graduate and undergraduate students will be trained by an interdisciplinary team of engineering, computer science, and nursing faculty members. The process guidance system and interfaces developed and evaluated through this project will be integrated into clinical simulation laboratory exercises used in the university?s nursing education curriculum.

This project will develop and evaluate a prototype system to provide on-line process monitoring and guidance to the performers of health care processes. An Institute of Medicine report has estimated that nearly 100,000 people per year die in US hospitals from preventable errors, and subsequent reports have suggested that many of these errors arise due to the complexity of hospital processes. The project will demonstrate how contextual information (retrospective, current, and prospective) can be used to provide process performers with timely information that could reduce errors, provide expedited warnings of impending hazards, and improve outcomes. Techniques to accumulate and represent historical data will be developed and will feed into profile-based analysis techniques that will evaluate probabilities and support making fine-grained process distinctions. These capabilities will provide a strong technological foundation for evidence-based, continuous process improvement.

Project technologies will be evaluated first using synthetic event streams generated by process model driven simulations, then by human simulations with nursing students using patient mannequins, and finally with medical professionals in simulated clinical settings. Processes to be examined include blood transfusion, chemotherapy, medication administration, and patient identification verification. Early community success in applying medical checklists and recent experimental results with proactive process guidance in a hospital emergency department are positive indications that the approaches proposed here have an excellent chance of gaining acceptance and improving medical outcomes. Moreover, the technologies developed here, although evaluated specifically for health care, will also apply to human-intensive systems increasingly employed in a wide range of domains in society. The validated medical processes and the proposed prototype will be an effective framework for educating medical professionals in current best practices. This project will also educate computer science and engineering students about the challenges posed by the medical domain, encouraging a new generation of specialists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. Its societal appeal will also help engage bright, energetic minority and female students thereby helping broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM generally and in computer science and engineering particularly.