Research projects (past and present)

Current research areas:

• Software engineering for distributed applications - Web Services, e-commerce, workflow management: formal techniques and methods for system requirement specification and the derivation of distributed system designs from global specifications
  • Deriving correct distributed system designs from global requirements, ongoing NSERC Discovery grant.
  • Requirements-Driven Development of Distributed Applications funded by an NSERC strategic grant (2002 - 2005).
  • Requirements engineering and design methods for distributed applications: NSERC Discovery grant (2005)
• Peer-to-peer systems - aiming at reliability and performance: providing predicable performance and reliability to various applications (e.g. database access, video distribution, etc.) by using peer-to-peer systems and techniques developed for Grid applications
• Crawling and analysing Rich Internet Applications : A series of IBM-NSERC CRD projects - see Software Security Research Group

Currently less active research areas:

• Optical networks - exploring future network architectures with time-sharing of wavelengths: agile all-photonic networks, time-sharing of wavelength bandwidth, network control and routing protocols
  • My first project on optical networks, "Optical networks and IP traffic" (early 2000), was  funded by NCIT and performed in collaboration with several other professors.
  • From 2002 through 2007, I was the leader of the "Network Architectures" theme of the Agile All-Photonic Networks project, an NSERC Research Network.which received the NSERC Synergy award in 2006.  Here are some copied pages.
  • User-Controlled Lightpath Provisioning (UCLP): Two projects were performed in collaboration with CRC during 2003-2007 (partially funded by Canarie) for developing UCLP Version 1 and 2. Here is a follow-up project.
• Quality of service management for distributed multimedia applications: adaptive applications, user and device mobility, security aspects, quality of service mangement and adaptation (see research description from 2002)
  • QoS and Distributed Systems Management: This project was part of the Major Project on Enabling Technologies for Electronic Commerce (1998-2003).
  • Additional work was funded by CITO, and by Nortel Networks.
• Hewlett-Packard - NSERC - CITI Industrial Research Chair (1989 through 1997) : Most research was related to the development of test cases for communication protocols and software systems - black-box testing, deriving test cases from the specification of the tested component, test development based on state-transition models, fault coverage issues, diagnostic testing.
  • Overview of research projects and resarch results (written in 1993)
  • During the same time, I was also a scientific director of the Centre de recherche informatique de Montreal (CRIM), and led many industry-collaboration projects organized through CRIM (see Chair).
• Formal description techniques for communication protocols and other applications: Development and standardization of modeling languages for communication protocols and services (Estelle language and SDL - precursors of UML State diagrams), development of tools for generation of implementation code and test cases from system specifications (mainly during the 1980ies and 1990ies)