Dr. Jaakko Järvi, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, has received a 2009 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for his research in methods for increasing software reusability.

Järvi is the ninth Texas A&M Engineering faculty member to receive a CAREER Award in the 2008-2009 academic year, and the second in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

NSF awards the prestigious CAREER grants to outstanding junior faculty members to help them advance their research and teaching activities. Järvi’s project, “From Incidental Algorithms to Reusable Components: Managing the Emergent Complexity of Large Scale Software Systems,” will continue through 2014.

“Real-world software systems are large, complex, multilayered systems built from diverse collections of components. Though individual components are often reusable, the code that manages the interactions between components seldom is. These interactions form incidental structures, and even though they are real data structures, they lack an explicit representation in program code and are difficult to reuse or manipulate,” Järvi says.

The project aims to identify these incidental structures, specifically those that arise in user interfaces (UI’s), and model them as explicit software artifacts. The result is that large amounts of ad-hoc code can be replaced by reusable algorithms and other components.

“The proposed work will impact future large-scale software development, aiming to realize increased productivity and software that is more reliable, efficient and predictable.”

Järvi received his Ph.D. from the University of Turku (Finland) in 2000, and joined the faculty at Texas A&M in 2004. His teaching and research interests include generic and generative programming, software libraries, programming languages, type systems, and software construction in general.

The NSF established the CAREER program to support junior faculty within the context of their overall career development, combining in a single program the support of research and education of the highest quality in the broadest sense. Through this program, the NSF emphasizes the importance of the early development of academic careers dedicated to simulating the discovery process in which the excitement of research is enhanced by inspired teaching and enthusiastic learning. For more on the NSF and the CAREER program, visit http://www.nsf.gov.

Written by Tony Okonski, tonyo@cse.tamu.edu

Popularity: 41% [?]

Both comments and pings are currently closed.