"The Requirements' Problem in Software Engineering"

We review the history of requirements analysis in Software Engineering, from early box-and-arrow notations, to goal-oriented models of stakeholder needs. We then present some of our recent work on designing agent-oriented software and adaptive systems by exploiting rich models of actors, their goals and social inter-dependencies. Throughout the discussion, we focus on the concepts used to model requirements, the analysis techniques that come with these concepts, and the design spaces the designer explores and she searches for solutions to a given requirements problem.

Βιογραφικά στοιχεία:
John Mylopoulos holds a distinguished professor position (chiara fama) at the University of Trento, and a professor emeritus position at the University of Toronto. He earned a PhD degree from Princeton University in 1970 and joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto that year. His research interests include conceptual modelling, requirements engineering, data semantics and knowledge management. Mylopoulos is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Sciences). He has served as programme/general chair of international conferences in Artificial Intelligence, Databases and Software Engineering, including IJCAI (1991), Requirements Engineering (1997), and VLDB (2004). Mylopoulos was recently awarded an advanced grant from the European Research Council for a project titled "Lucretius: Foundations for Software Evolution".