Current research projects

• SMILE IT (Jan 2015 → Dec 2019)
  
  
  SMILE-IT is funded by IWT (SBO). Modern society is full of networked systems, consisting of many collaborating and competing agents, both human and machine. Such agent-driven networks can be found in a wide range of problem areas, such as telecommunications, smart grids, smart cities, traffic guidance, and flight control. As the complexity and size of these networks increases, automated techniques for configuring, guiding, and managing them become increasingly important, in order to limit operational costs and guarantee optimality. The SMILE-IT project aims to develop such an automated network management framework, based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques. Two application domains, important in the Flemish economic landscape, have been selected for concrete valorization tracks, telecommunication networks and smart grid applications. Key players from both domains will be present in the user committee, and concrete follow-up tracks are in the process of being defined. For example, interaction with the smart grids industry showed the essential need for multi-agent systems to enable smart grid applications like demand response. Different stakeholders (e.g., consumer, DSO, BRP) can be represented by a network of interacting agents, avoiding the inevitable increase in cost and calculation time of a centrally controlled system. 

• Foundations of programming models for next-generation computing platform (2014 → 2019)
  
  This strategic research plan has the goal to focus on fundamental research topics to improve the scientific output of the Software Languages Lab. A large part of the research conducted at the Software Languages Lab can be divided over three domains: Ambient Oriented Programming, Parallel Programming and Cloud Computing. The research project aims to simultaneously improve the research in these three domains based on the high degree of congruency between them. Concretely, this proposal will focus on three fundamental questions that apply over the three domains. First, how to harness concurrency and orchestrate the interaction between a large number of computations. Second, how to control the data distribution between a large number of concurrently executing processes. Finally, how to development formally grounded tools to assist the programmer to detect and fix bugs early on in the development process. In order to successfully answer these questions formal methods such as type systems, contracts, symbolic execution and model verification will be applied.
• Cha-Q (January 2013→ December 2016)  Website: http://soft.vub.ac.be/chaq/
  Software systems are changed continuously. For instance, to repair a reported bug or to ensure that a new functional requirement is met. This constant need for change drives the manner in which modern software is developed, as evidenced by the trend towards iterative and agile development processes. However, automated testing approaches, bug trackers and static analyses still start from the fundamental assumption that they act upon a single, complete release of the system. As a result, there exists a remarkable disparity between the trend towards embracing change and the tools used by today's software engineers. The main objective of the Cha-Q (Change-centric Quality Assurance) project is therefore to devise innovative tools that enable change-centric software development. This by representing changes themselves as first-class entities. Concretely, we will investigate how to safeguard a system's quality in an incremental manner, how to repeat changes reliably on a closely-related system, and how to maintain changes throughout a system's lifetime —all by manipulating first-class changes.
• Gradual Verification of Event-driven Programs (2013→2017)
  This is an FWO-funded project in cooperation with Prof. Bart Jacobs (DistriNet/KULeuven). More and more, computer applications need to be concurrent, to deal with multiple input streams and to utilize multi-core hardware, and distributed, to access an ever growing range of consumer and business services in the cloud and in corporate networks. The development of such programs is encumbered by concurrency pitfalls such as race conditions and deadlocks, and distribution hazards such as connection failures and the lack of a single coordinating entity. A promising foundation for such programs is actor-based concurrency with asynchronous message passing, which rules out low-level data races and deadlocks, and promotes applications that deal gracefully with communication failures. However, it is not a panacea: the event-based model is particularly vulnerable to higher-level safety and liveness issues, such as unanticipated message interleavings and distributed delegation loops. In this project, we investigate these challenges and develop reasoning principles and tooling strategies to address them. Such tooling will include static verification tools to efficiently establish mathematical certainty of critical application correctness properties. However, to allow for quick independent evolution, we will design our tooling strategy from the ground up to enable gradual verification, where static verification is integrated seamlessly with run-time enforcement approaches. This novel combined approach promises to significantly improve the ease of delivering correct event-based systems.
• ExaScience Life (2013→2015) Website: http://www.exascience.com/
  ExaScience Life is a large interdisciplinary IWT project, set up as a collaboration between the five Flemish universities and two industrial partners: Intel and Janssen Pharmaceutica. The broad topic of ExaScience Life is to explore scientific applications for the next generation of supercomputers. Today, we are building peta-FLOP scale supercomputers, for the next decade we are expecting exascale. Such massive increase in processing power unlocks new types of scientific applications, exascale computing is therefor seen as a new driving force for scientific discoveries. However, the jump to exascale computing faces several challenges. New hardware, software and algorithmic breakthroughs are required before we can scale existing computations and unlock new types scientific applications. ExaScience Life is tackling life sciences applications, specifically: gene sequencing and bio statistics. Both are critical for the long term vision of pharmaceutical companies, but are also limited by the amount of computational power that can be brought to bear. Not only can time and costs be reduced significantly, the exascale computing power can enable new analysis and modeling techniques that are simply not possible today within a relevant timescale. This project is a large cooperation between computer scientists, computer architects, mathematicians, statisticians, biologists and pharmacologists. The VUB is represented by the Software Languages Lab (SOFT) and applies its expertise in parallel programming to the work unit on programming models and runtime environments.
• i-SCOPE (2012 -> 2015) Website: http://www.iscopeproject.net/
  The latest generation of 3D Urban Information Models (UIM), created from accurate urban-scale geospatial information, can be used to create smart web services based on geometric, semantic, morphological and structural information at urban scale level, which can be used by local governments to: - improve decision-making on issues related to urban planning, city management, environmental protection and energy consumption based on urban pattern and its morphology; - promote inclusion among various users groups (e.g. elder or diversely able citizens) through services which account for barriers at city level; - involve citizens at wider scale by collecting geo-referenced information based on location based services at urban scale. Based on interoperable 3D UIMs, i-SCOPE delivers an open platform on top of which it develops, within different domains, three ‘smart city’ services. These will be piloted and validated, within a number of EU cities which will be actively engaged throughout the project lifecycle. The services will address: 1) Improved inclusion and personal mobility of aging and diversely able citizens through an accurate city-level differently-abled-friendly personal routing service which accounts for detailed urban layout, features and barriers. 2) Optimization of energy consumption through a service for accurate assessment of solar energy potential and energy loss at building level. 3) Environmental monitoring through a real-time environmental noise mapping service leveraging citizen’s involvement will who act as distributed sensors city-wide measuring noise levels through their mobile phones. All smart services will be based on already available technologies which will be integrated, deployed and made publicly available from a “3D smart EU cities” portal. Potential trust, privacy and data security risks and vulnerabilities, i.e. due to localisation of people, are integral part of the project and will be explicitly addressed.
• Cart-ASUR (2012 →2016) Website: http://noisetube.net/cartasur/
  The purpose of the CartASUR (Représentations Cartographiques de la qualité des Ambiances Sonores Urbaines: acceptabilité des Cartes) research project in which SOFT is a subcontractor is to develop a tool capable of creating sound maps representing the urban soundscape at different spatial scales of the city (such as major roads and neighborhoods) as well as different time scales (such as a time period within a year or the time of day). This tool can help policy makers to enrich noise levels with perceptual and geographic indicators. Hence, soundscapes in urban public space are enriched with sense of pleasure/discomfort perceived by its citizens. Noise level indicators are currently defined on a yearly and national scale and do not incorporate citizen perception. We hypothesize that noise level indicators can be constructed from perceived data (citizen-supplied data transmitted via their mobile phone), from acoustic data (measurements taken of the changing sound level over time), and from other geo-referenced data (collected from local authorities). The aggregated data will allow policy makers to better take into account the effect of noise on the quality of life. Additionally, this tool can be used by citizens to govern their own city.
• AIRCO (2012→2015)
  We have entered an era in software engineering where ICT solutions are composed of multiple services and components that are independently developed and deployed on remote service platforms and, therefore, also independently evolve. To support improved modularization and customization of such composed applications, Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is a promising composition technology because it supports invasive composition and customization interfaces alongside traditional composition of required and provided interfaces. However current AOSD techniques lack the required robustness to control the composition of the software system due to two notorious hard to solve problems: aspect interference and fragility. These problems are particularly true and stronger in contexts where components are independently developed and deployed by third parties. The aim of this project is three-fold (1) Establish a coherent AOSD-based invasive composition approach in which the fundamental problems of aspect interference and fragility are treated as variants of the same problem: the violation of implicit implementation assumptions. (2) Based on this foundation, propose and develop alive interfaces for invasive composition that reify implementation assumptions as dynamic metadata whose semantics co-evolves as the application evolves. (3)Exploiting dynamic metadata, propose and develop a policy specification mechanism for enforcing system-wide invariants over the architecture of the applications.
• COGNAC (2011 → 2015)
  In the future people will be surrounded by devices which will seamlessly cooperate with each other to create a consistent ambient computational environment. To deal with the dynamicity of this environment, resulting from intermittent network connectivity as devices move in and out of contact with each other, new abstractions are required to coordinate the resulting distributed soup of objects residing across the devices. The aim of the COGNAC project is to build upon a formal actor-based concurrency model to provide gradual type system support that statically and dynamically reifies the ownership and location information present in remote object designation concepts. This offers coordination abstractions, such as ambient contracts, that simplifies the programmer’s task of developing and securing applications for devices that cooperate over intermittent network connections. COGNAC is a project funded by FWO and executed in partnership with KUL.
  Topic: Coordination and Ownership in Graphs of Networked Actors.
• Renaissance (started 2008)  Website: http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr/renaissance/
  With the change in processor designs and the challenges that come with concurrent and parallel programming, we need to look for new programming paradigms. The need for correctness and the thinking in deterministic algorithms have governed the way we build software. However, with the change to parallel architectures as the norm, it seems that we need to focus on either guaranteed correctness or absolute performance. In this project, we investigate together with IBM Research and the Portland State University how programming models can work in such settings and how we can bound the expected errors to acceptable levels.  Topic: Non-deterministic Programming as the Enabler to Harness the Power of Manycore Computing

Past research projects

• MobiCraNT (2011 → 2013) Website: http://soft.vub.ac.be/mobicrant/start
  Today‘s mobile applications typically run on PDAs, follow a client-server division, and rely on traditional user interfaces such as keyboard, stylus or touchscreen. This landscape is changing swiftly. On the one hand, we see the advent of Smartphones featuring various sensors, RFID-readers and GPS-chips, blurring the distinction between clients and servers of information and thus inducing fluid information spaces. On the other hand, we see the rise of new interface modalities such as voice interaction, digital pen and paper, gestures and so on. These observations lead us to conclude that we are entering an era of mobile cross-media applications that (a) operate in a heterogeneous distributed setting and that (b) interact using cross-media technology. MobiCraNT aims at the development of software engineering principles and patterns for the development of such applications.
  Topic: Second Generation Mobile Cross-media Applications: Scalability, Heterogeneity and Legacy.
• VariBru 2 (2010 → 2013)
  Research project together with Sirris, VUB-WISE, ULB-CoDE and UCL-INGI initiated in the framework of the Brussels Impulse Programme for ICT. It is supported by the Brussels Capital Region.
  Topic: Variability in Software-Intensive Product Development.
  Website: http://www.varibru.be/
• ExaScience (2010 → 06/2013)
  The Software Languages Lab is an active partner in the Flanders ExaScience Lab, one of the Intel research labs in Europe. The lab, a partnership between all Flemish universities, IMEC and Intel, is funded by the IWT and Intel. The lab performs research in High-performance Computing for Exascale systems, using Space Weather prediction as an application driver. Within the Exascience lab, the Software Languages lab focuses on new programming models, techniques and language runtime support for exascale computing.
• RECOCO (2009 → 2012)
  Ensuring that software can display different behavior in different use contexts requires adapting software at runtime in dynamically created scopes. Context-oriented Programming (COP) offers dedicated language constructs for performing such dynamically scoped adaptations. However, COP hits a conceptual barrier when new variations of existing program entities are integrated into a running system: Although COP inherently preserves some structural integrity requirements, global state consistency requirements cannot be automatically ensured. Managing dynamically scoped adaptations therefore requires additional application-specific logic from within the system itself. The aim of this FWO project is two-fold: (i) the description of the foundations of Context-oriented Programming that allows systematic reasoning about system-wide consistency, and (ii) the creation of a reflective architecture implementing application-specific policies for dealing with such consistency conflicts.
  Topic: Reflective Reconfiguration Support for Context-dependent Software Updates.
• SAFE-IS (2009 → 2012)
  This FWO project is situated in the domain of the Internet of Things, where computing power is introduced into everyday object that will enable them to communicate with one another and with more traditional computers. This project focuses on such event-intensive software systems where the crux of the problem lies in the volatility and massiveness of the information produced. SAFE-IS will use an integrated approach at tackling these problems, consisting both of an innovative open programming language and an innovative middleware layer.
  Topic: Software Abstractions for Event-intensive Systems.
• Brussense (2009 → 2012)
  The BrusSense team is formed by Matthias Stevens and Ellie D’Hondt, two young and ambitious researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s Computer Science Department. It is a continuation and an extension of the NoiseTube project, which investigated participatory techniques for monitoring noise pollution. In particular we turned mobile phones into noise sensors, thus enabling each citizen to measure personal exposure in his or her everyday environment. A collective map of noise pollution is built up by automatic sharing of users’ geolocalized measures within the community. BrusSense will extend this approach towards atmospheric pollution as well as implement a case study in the Brussels Region, an urban area with pollution problems aplenty.
• STADiUM (2009 → 2012)
  Contemporary distributed software systems have become extremely heterogeneous, dynamic and large-scale; they may include backend servers, regular PCs, various mobile and ubiquitous devices, plus diverse network infrastructures, such as mobile ad-hoc and wireless sensor networks. The STADiUM project, funded by IWT, addresses this complex context and investigates a next generation management platform that is adaptable to various operational conditions and available system resources. The platform will be based on a middleware architecture that embraces adaptation, a set of reusable service frameworks at the device as well as the distribution level of the middleware, and a family of configuration languages.
  Topic: Software Technology for Adaptable Distributed Middleware.
  Website: http://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/projects/stadium/
• MoVES (01/01/2007 → 31/12/2011)
  Interuniversity Attraction Pole research project funded by Belgian Science Policy Office in cooperation with Universiteit Antwerpen, Université catholique de Louvain, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix Namur, Université de Liège, and KULeuven. Topic: Modelling, Verification and Evolution of Software. Website: http://prog.vub.ac.be/moves
• Do-it-Yourself Smart Experiences (DiYSE) (2009 → 2011)
  This Itea2 project (2009 → 2011) aims at enabling ordinary people to easily create, setup and control applications in their smart living environments as well as in the public Internet-of-Things space, allowing them to leverage aware services and smart objects for obtaining highly personalised, social, interactive, flowing experiences at home and in the city. AmbientTalk is used as the underlying language to implement NOW, an ambient workflow language which enables professional amateurs (end-users with technical skills but no formal training) to compose, adapt and construct do-it-yourself applications.

• CRYPTASC (2007 → 2010)  Website: http://cryptasc.vub.ac.be
  A large proportion of currently used cryptographic protocols are not provably secure. Rather, in many cases it is a practical computational impossibility that is exploited in order to build cryptographic protocols. Quantum technologies play a central role in this context as it has been recognized that, by coding information into quantum carriers such as single photons, a level of true informational security can be attained. The resulting concept of “quantum cryptography” is now becoming a commercial reality. The ambition of the project CRYPTASC is, one the one hand, to carry out a research programme aiming at the development and valorisation of quantum key distribution in the Brussels region, and, on the second hand, to explore the prospects of quantum technologies for the realization of new cryptographic primitives that go beyond key distribution, such as identification, authentication, and so on. A parallel objective of CRYPTASC is to develop a particularly promising side-product of quantum key distribution techniques, namely very high-rate random number generators.
  Topic: Advanced ICT Solutions to CRYPTography, Authentication and Secure Communication.
• WIT-CASE (2005 → 2007)
  Bilateral Research Project together with Alcatel and KULeuven partly funded by IWT Flanders.
  Topic: Workflow Innovations, Technologies and Capabilities for Service-Enabling.
• ASPECTLAB (2005 → 2009)
  SBO research project funded by IWT Flanders together with UGent, and KULeuven.
  Topic: Aspect Oriented Software Development applied.
  Website: http://ssel.vub.ac.be/aspectlab
• DyBroWS (2005 → 2009)
  Research Project funded by FWO Flanders together with UGent.
  Topic: Intelligent dynamic brokering of web services based on performance models.
• AOSD EUROPE (2004 → 2008)
  European Network of Excellence in cooperation with the University of Lancaster (UK), Universiteit Twente (The Netherlands), Univeristy of Darmstadt (Germany), Trinity College Dublin( Ireland), INRIA (France), University of Malaga (Spain), The Technion (Israel), KUL (Belgium), Siemens (Germany) and IBM (UK).
  Topic: Virtual European Research Centre on Aspect-Oriented Software Development.
  Website: http://www.aosd-europe.net
• ORION (2006 → 2007) Website: http://prog.vub.ac.be/amop/projects/orion
  ORION is a scientific collaboration project with the Universidad de Chile funded by the Flemish Government. The project brings together experts in the development of reflectively implemented language features for open networks of mobile devices and experts in partial behavioural reflection which work on techniques to optimize the use of reflective hooks while retaining a maximum of expressiveness. The goal of the project is to investigate how these research strengths can be combined to produce practicable open reflective infrastructures for open networks.
  Topic: Open Reflective Infrastructure for Open Networks.
• CODAMOS (2003 → 2007)
  SBO research project funded by IWT Flanders together with UGent, KULeuven and LUC.
  Topic: Context-Driven Adaptation of Mobile Services.
  Website: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/cwis/research/distrinet/projects/CoDAMoS/
• Arriba (2002 → 2006)
  The aim of this project was to provide a methodology and its associated tools in order to support the integration of disparate business applications that have not necessarily been designed to coexist. Inspiration came from real concerns resulting from an investigative effort on the part of some of the research partners in this consortium; the object of the investigation was the identification of mainstream ICT problems with a representative forum of Belgian enterprises (large and small) that rely on information technology for their critical business activities. An overview of concrete research results can be found in the folder distributed on the project's closing event.
  Topic: Architectural Resources for the Restructuring and Integration of Business Applications.
  Website: http://arriba.vub.ac.be
• Advanced Media Project (2003 → 2005)
  The visionary context for this work was to provide an interactive media experience in which people no longer want to “sit back, relax, and consume the media”. Interactive media are the integration of a traditional content component (audio, video, …) with a behavioural component (software). Examples of such behavioural components are online gaming, quiz software, and virtual community worlds. The way in which this kind of software should be produced not only requires an advanced set of development tools but also a different view on development in general. Concretely we advocated a situation in which the interactive media producer writes down a high level specification (using a domain specific language) and pushes a button that automatically generates the corresponding software implementation(s) (using generative programming). All of this with special attention to the evolvability and reusability of the underlying generation system.
  Topic: Software Automation and Knowledge Engineering Research Track.
  Website: http://prog.vub.ac.be/sake/
• Scientific Research Network on Foundations of Software Evolution (2001 → 2005)
  The goal of this FWO network was to come to a consistent set of formally-founded techniques and associated tools to support software developers with the common problems they encounter when developing large and complex software systems. The interdisciplinary character of the research network was reflected in the uniform use of mathematical formalisms as a foundation for concrete tools to support software evolution throughout the entire software development life-cycle. This resulted in formally founded tools for forward engineering, reverse engineering, re-engineering and team engineering.
  Website: http://prog.vub.ac.be/FFSE/network.html
• A Formal Foundation for Software Refactoring (2002 → 2004)
  The aim of this FWO-funded project was to provide a solid foundation for software refactoring through the development of a suitable formal model. Graph rewriting was explored as the basis of a lightweight model, facilitating the investigation of basic properties of refactoring, as well as the design of tools supporting the refactoring process.
  Website: http://www.lore.ua.ac.be/refactoringProject/
• MOSAIC (2002 → 2004)
  Bilateral Research Project together with Alcatel partly funded by IWT Flanders.
  Topic: Integrating Service Value Enablers in the Mosaic of Access and Edge Network Environments.
• Digital Platform VRT - MPEG Project (2001 → 2003)
  The MPEG research project aimed to create a competence centre around MPEG in Flanders. It focused on developing a content management system allowing one to manage different kinds of multimedia. Part of the research investigated how existing multimedia can be converted into a digital format so as to enable broadcasting over already existing and future channels and platforms.
• 3PSPP (2001 → 2002)
  Bilateral Research Project together with Alcatel partly funded by IWT Flanders.
  Topic: Processes and Tools for 3th party service provisioning for the PSS.
• ADAPSIS (2000 → 2002)
  IWT project ism Alcatel en Data4S.
  Topic: Adaptation of IP Services based on Profiles.
• SEESCOA (1999 → 2003)
  STWW project – Topproject ism KUL, RUG, LUC en PROG-VUB.
  Topic: Software Engineering for Embedded Systems using a Component Approach.
• Component Development and Product Assembly in a Software Factory Organisation, Process and Tools - SoFa (1999 → 2002)
  Sofa was an IWT-funded research project performed in collaboration with EDS Belgium and MediaGenix.
• GeoObjects (1999 → 2001)
  IWT project ism TeleAtlas.
  Topic: Quality Assurance Mechanisms based on Business-rule Enabling Spatial Objects in Geographic Databases.
• Multiservice Network Technologies (1999 → 2001)
  ITA-II project - Generisch Basisonderzoek ism RUG, KUL, IMEC, UIA.
  Topic: Service Engineering.
• Compliance checking in object-oriented systems (1999 → 2000)
  This project was performed with the industrial partner Getronics Belgium. Its goal was to study the change propagation problems that occur in software reuse and iterative development, and to investigate the technique of compliance checking as a potential solution to these problems. We investigated mechanisms for compliance checking which verify the consistency between modified or newly added software artifacts with existing artifacts in the system.
• Advanced Internet Access (1998 → 2000)\\ITA-II project ism Alcatel Antwerpen.
  Topic: Methodologie voor Service Creatie.
• Ontwerp en controle van breedbandnetwerken voor multimedia toepassingen (1996 → 1998)
  ITA-I project – Generisch Basisonderzoek ism RUG, UIA en IMEC.
  Topic: Analyse en Specificatie van Multimedia Diensten.
• Data-mining (1995 → 1997)
  VUB OZR ism ASYS-VUB.
• BALTA (1994 → 1995)
  IWT project ism CENTEXBEL.
• Modelleren van een productieproces in een textielfabriek.
  Matching fund 750000 uitrusting. (1994)
  VUB OZR.
• INSYDE (1994 → 1996)
  Esprit III project ism Humbolt University, Dublin University, Alcatel Antwerpen, Verilog Parijs en Intracom Athene.
  Topic: Integrated Methods for System Design.
• Integratie van klassieke dataanalyse technieken met gedragsbeschrijvingen zoals die voorkomen in formele specificatietalen (1993 → 1994)
  VUB OZR project.
• Intelligent netwerkbeheer (1992 → 1996)
  NFWO project.
• CONSTRUCT (1990 → 1992)
  Esprit II project ism Siscog Lissabon en Renault Parijs.
  Topic: Computer Assisted Knowledge Engineering for Construction Tasks.
• AI Technieken in Computer Netwerk Management (1989 → 1990)
  NFWO Krediet aan navorser.
• HIPACS (1989 → 1990)
  AIM project ism Dienst Radiologie AZ VUB.
  Topic: Hospital Integrated Picture Archiving and Communication System - Ontwikkeling van een prototype voor een traffiekmanagement systeem voor een beeldarchiverings en communicatie-systeem in een hospitaalomgeving.
• TROTELC (1988 → 1992)
  DaD projekt ism Bell-Alcatel.
  Ontwikkeling van een tweede generatie expertsysteem voor troubleshooting van printplaten.
• Expertsystemen voor netwerkmanagement (1988 → 1992)
  VUB OZR project.