Dr. Wong and Colleagues Hold I/UCRC S2ERC Meeting at UT Dallas
Professor Eric Wong and his colleagues organized a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored I/UCRC planning meeting on February 16 and 17, 2017. This was part of the ongoing effort to make the Advanced Research Center for Software Testing and Quality Assurance (STQA) at UT Dallas a major university site of S2ERC − a Nationwide Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Security and Software Engineering.
“Our immediate objective is not only to help the academic community better understand issues that are vital to the industry, but also to give practitioners an opportunity to express their needs. Through such meetings, we can establish good communication channels among faculty, students, engineers, and managers so that they can team-up to work on projects of mutual interest. The long-term impact is to prepare our students to become better-qualified engineers upon entering the workforce. As a result, it can help companies improve their productivity at a reduced cost,” noted Dr. Eric Wong.
Dr. Wong continued on saying, “Our focus is on promoting research and developing advanced cutting-edge technologies for technology transfer. We intend to close the gap between the state-of-art research conducted in an academic setting and the state-of-practice techniques used in the field. Many projects presented are designed to assist practitioners, no matter what their previous level of experience with software testing and quality assurance (including security, safety, reliability, modeling, data analysis, etc.), to be quickly brought up to speed on the necessary background knowledge and gain the ability to apply a cost-effective set of procedures tailored to their specific projects. With this, it is more likely that software can be better tested to ensure high quality at reduced cost.”
The meeting included project presentations by faculty and students, as well as round-table discussions among industry representatives, NSF program directors, and faculty from UT Dallas. Meeting agenda and other materials can be found at the STQA website.
Dr. Eric Wong and his colleagues would like give special thanks to Dr. Dmitri Perkins (NSF I/UCRC Program Director), Professor Craig Scott (NSF I/UCRC Evaluator), Professor Wayne Zage (Director of S2ERC), Professor Mark Spong (Dean of School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas) and Professor Gopal Gupta (Head of Computer Science Department at UT Dallas) for their strong support in making this meeting a great success.
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 2,100 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1,000 MS master’s students, 150 PhD students, and 86 faculty members, as of Fall 2016. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.