Lero (software engineering)

For the Celtic god, see Lero.

Lero (The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre),[1] Ireland, was established in 2005 as a Science Foundation Ireland[2] Centre for Science Engineering and Technology (CSET), being one of nine (originally ten) such centres established by the Irish Government in various areas of science and engineering.

Overview

Lero’s first Centre Director was Professor Kevin T. Ryan,[3] and Scientific Director Professor Klaus Pohl. Professor Mike Hinchey has been Director of Lero since mid-2010. Professor Bashar Nuseibeh served as Chief Scientist from 2010 to 2014 and was succeeded by Professor Brian Fitzgerald.

Lero is a distributed centre, incorporating the University of Limerick (lead partner), University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University, National University of Ireland Galway and Dundalk Institute of Technology. It involves about 114 researchers and staff.

Lero has industrial ties to multinational companies such as IBM and Intel, to indigenous Irish industry such as Information Mosaic, and to government agencies such as the European Space Agency.

Research

Lero’s research[4] is focused on the field of Evolving Critical Systems (ECS), which can be considered to be a sub-field of Software Engineering, and considers how software that may be critical to an organization’s mission, product base, profitability or competitive advantage may be evolved in a manner than is reliable and predictable and without incurring extreme costs. Software must evolve over time to meet changing requirements and regulations. Many of today’s software systems have evolved from legacy code and legacy systems, or have evolved as a result of a focused and intentional change in organization and architecture to exploit newer techniques believed to be beneficial.

Of interest to Lero are systems that must adapt and evolve at run-time in order to react to changes in the environment or to meet necessary constraints on the system that were not previously satisfied and possibly not previously known. Lero hosts international conferences and meetings.[5]

Education

Lero is host to the Lero Graduate School in Software Engineering (LGSSE).[6] This structured PhD programme offers a 4-year PhD that is undertaken with one year of coursework, including courses on philosophy and research methods, and 3-years of research, combining elements of the US and European PhD models. Students take courses at any of the institutions that combine to make up Lero. Part-time industry-based PhDs and Masters programmes are also undertaken.

Outreach

Lero established an Education and Outreach Programme in 2007. The centre organises activities at second-level, third-level and fourth-level. Lero has developed a set of Scratch teaching materials that are being used in many schools around the country. It also organises an annual Scratch competition.[7]

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, April 15, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.