Distinguished Visiting Fellowship: Prof John Mylopoulos

Professor John Mylopoulos (University of Toronto, Canada) worked with Professor Haris Mouratidis and researchers from the Centre for Secure, Usable and Intelligent Sysems in security and privacy requirements engineering.

Adaptive systems usually operationalize adaptation through a feedback loop, an architectural prosthesis that introduces monitoring, diagnosis and compensation functions to the system proper. During Professor Mylopoulos' visit, the team studied the requirements that lead to such feedback loop functionality.

In particular, they introduced new classes of requirements, called respectively awareness and evolution requirements, which are best operationalized through feedback loops instead of collections of functions. These requirements are characterized by the fact that they refer to other requirements, quality constraints or domain assumptions. We then discuss elicitation, modeling, formalization for awareness and evolution requirements and how to go from such requirements to feedback loops through a systematic process. In addition, we sketch a framework for monitoring, diagnosis and compensation grounded on requirements models.

This was joint work with Vitor Souza (UFES Brazil), Kostas Angelopoulos (UniTN Italy) and Alexei Lapouchnian (UToronto Canada).

John Mylopoulos earned a PhD degree from Princeton University in 1970 and joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto that year. He has held positions at the University of Toronto (Assistant/Associate/Full Professor) and University of Trento (Distinguished Professor/Chiara Fama). He was visiting Associate Professor at Harvard University, Visiting Professor at the University of Rome, and visiting Research Professor at City University of Hong Kong. He holds a professor emeritus position at the Universities of Toronto and Trento. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, of the Entity-Relationship Foundation, and of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association. In recognition of his contribution to the research community, he was awarded the 2010 Peter P. Chen award, a lifetime service award (IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference), and an Honorary Doctorate degree (RWTH-Aachen University).

He was president of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence and of the VLDB endowment.He has expertise in Software Systems Evolution, Requirements Engineering, Conceptual Modelling. He has published 450 articles, he has received best paper awards and the most influential paper awards (IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference-RE’11, International Conference on Software Engineering- ICSE’94). He has an h-index of 76 and he has received 26500 citations. He has also extensive experience on securing and delivering research grants having secured funding of more than $18 million. Mylopoulos is currently leading a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for a project titled “Lucretius: Foundations for Software Evolution”.