Faculty Profile

Professor: Computer Science, Graduate School

Shaoying LIU

• Ph.D. (Computer Science)

Research area:

• Software Engineering
• Formal Engineering Methods
• Intelligent Software Engineering

Related site:

• http://cis.k.hosei.ac.jp/~sliu/

Personal Statement

Shaoying Liu holds BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, and a Ph.D in Formal Methods from the University of Manchester, U.K. He worked as a lecturer at Xi'an Jiaotong University, as a Research Associate at the University of York, and as a Research Assistant at the Royal Holloway and Bedford New College at the University of London, respectively, before 1994. He then worked as an Associate Professor at Hiroshima City University in Japan for six years before joining the Department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences at Hosei University in April 2000.

Shaoying Liu was invited as a Visiting Research Fellow by The Queen's University of Belfast from December 1994 to February 1995, and as an Academic Visitor to Oxford University from December 1998 to February 1999. He has served and is serving as the General Chair for the IEEE conferences ICFEM '97 and ICECCS 2002, and was program co-chair for these two conferences four times in the period from 1997 to 2001. In addition, he has served as a program committee member for many other international conferences. In order to help advance research and development in the area of Formal Engineering Methods, he and his colleagues founded the IEEE Conference ICFEM in Hiroshima in 1997.

Shaoying Liu received an “Outstanding Paper Award” from the IEEE conference ICECCS '96, and two certificates for outstanding services to the IEEE conferences. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society.

Teaching Courses

Goal

The goal of my research and education is to create and teach the most rigorous, user-friendly, and cost-effective methods, languages, and tools to attack the strongest challenge in software engineering: how to develop correct software systems with good efficiency, usability, and maintainability. I hope that more and more excellent graduate students will join my group to study the most advanced methods and techniques in system modeling, specification, design, verification, validation, management, evolution, and supporting tools of software systems, and to become the leading force in Japanese software industry and research in the future.

Research Area

Laboratory

My current research is focused on the development and support of Formal Engineering Methods, Intelligent Software Engineering Environments, and Safety-Critical and Complex Computer Systems. The specific topics of my current research are as follows:

1. The design and development of the SOFL (Structured Object-oriented Formal Language) specification language and method for rigorous modeling, specification, design, verification, and validation of complex software systems.
2. Automated transformation from formal specifications to programs.
3. Specification testing and specification-based program testing.
4. Rigorous reviews of formal specifications.
5. Intelligent supporting tool for the formal engineering method SOFL.
6. Formal approach to defining and control software development processes.
7. Web-based software engineering.

Research Projects

My research aims to develop effective methods, languages, techniques, and software supporting tools for constructing correct or highly reliable software systems. One of such potential technology is formal engineering methods with effective tool supports. My specific research areas are formal engineering methods, intelligent software engineering environments, and safety-critical and complex computer systems. The detailed descriptions of these three areas are given as follows:

(1) Formal Engineering Methods

Formal engineering methods is a bridge between formal methods and their applications. It is a field of research on integration of formal methods into practical software engineering process in order to provide practical formal languages and methods for engineers to use in industry. My particular interests are on the SOFL Specification language and method. SOFL stands for Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language, and has been developed by myself and my colleagues on several funded projects over last decade. As a language SOFL is an integration, with necessary extensions, of Data Flow Diagrams, Petri Nets, and VDM-SL. Data Flow Diagram provides a comprehensible notation for expressing the overall architecture of a system, and Petri Nets is used to provide an operational semantics for the Data Flow Diagrams. VDM-SL is employed to specify the behavior of processes occurring in the related Data Flow Diagrams. To achieve information hiding, specification reusability, and polymorphism, data stores occurring in the Data Flow Diagrams may be defined as classes, if appropriate. As a method, SOFL emphasizes the three-step approach, i.e., informal, semi-formal, and formal specifications, for the construction of system specifications, and the rigorous reviews and testing as techniques for verifying and validating specifications and programs.

(2) Intelligent Software Engineering Supporting Environments

I believe that the radical solution for the problem of software crisis is to provide software engineering environments that take care of all the process management and control issues, and have ability to guide the developers to develop their systems step by step. Within such environments, the developers only need to concentrate on the jobs that the computer cannot perform at all. Also, such environments should be able to learn from previous experience in building similar systems and to make use of the existing knowledge from previous experience for the development of new systems. I call such an environment Intelligent Software Engineering Supporting Environment (ISESE). In the exciting internet era, more and more software systems are developed by a team or teams, possibly located in several different places in the world, supporting distributed software engineering over internet becomes more and more important and necessary. My another research interest is to develop internet-based distributed, software engineering supporting Environments.

(3) Safety-Critical and Complex Computer Systems

Safety-critical computer systems are the systems that are controlled by computer and whose failure may cause catastrophic damage to human life or important properties, such as railway systems, airplane control systems, and nuclear plant control systems. They are usually complex systems. By complex computer systems I mean the systems that are concerned with computer systems in some way and that involves complicated interactions between different components of many kinds during their development and operation. My interest in these fields is how to apply formal engineering methods, in particular SOFL, to develop high quality safety-critical and complex computer systems.

Formal　Engineering　Methods,　Intelligent and Internet-based Software Engineering Environments,　Safety-Critical and Complex Computer Systems

Publications

• 1996 - 2000
• 2001
• 2002
• 2003
• 2004
• 2005
• 2006
• 2007
• 2008