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Qiong Feng Graduate Student
College of Computing & Informatics –
Department of Computer Science
to attend The 13th Working IEEE/IFIP
Conference on Software Architecture
(WICSA)
This year WICSA was held in Venice,
Italy. As the website stated, “The 13th
Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on
Software Architecture (WICSA) is the
premier venue for practitioners and
researchers interested in Software
Architecture.” WICSA has the top reputation in the Software Architecture research
community. The theme of WICSA 2016 is “Architecting in time”. In this conference I
presented my research paper: “Towards an Architecture-centric Approach to Security
Analysis.” In this paper I proposed an architectural approach to software security
analysis and showed that architectural flaws are highly correlated with security bugs.
Furthermore, some concrete examples are shown to demonstrate that architectural
flaws can directly lead to software security problems. Researchers from other
universities showed a great interest in my presentation. They asked questions about
details of my work and asked to use our lab tool Titan to analyze their projects. They
also gave me some good ideas and insights for my future research. In addition, I also
attended other researchers’ presentations and we found some collaboration
opportunities. For example, currently our analysis is based on static dependency
between files. One research group from Kiel University in Germany does similar
research using dynamic dependency between files. We are considering collaborating
and writing another paper comparing and combing these two analysis’ results. Not
only research universities attended this conferences; some industry giants such
Huawei in China, ABB in Swedish-Swiss, Softserv in Ukraine, Ting in Italy also
participated in this conference. Since computer science is a practical science and it
aims to solve real problems in industry, the talks of industry cases studies from
architects in these big industry companies have enabled me to re-evaluate my
research topics and make sure they match industry needs. In this conference I also
met a lot of professors and young researchers from universities worldwide, such as
Prof. Rick Kazman from University of Hawaii, Prof. Rafael Capilla from Rey Juan Carlos
University, Prof. Eric Yuan from George Mason University, Xiwei Xu from National ICT
Australia, Christian Wulf from Kiel University, Mohamed Soliman from Universitat
Hamburg, etc. The connections with these professors and young researchers have kept
me active in the research community of software architecture and provided me with
future collaboration opportunities.