Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I work with Professors Lee Osterweil and Lori Clarke in the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER). In summer 2010, as a visiting researcher at Lero - the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, I worked with Professor Bashar Nuseibeh on applying process modeling and analysis techniques to security requirements definition and argumentation.

My work is the area of process definition and improvement. More specifically, I work on different techniques that can be used to model and accommodate process and system variation, and I am interested in how such techniques inform desiderata for process definition languages. I have concentrated on two different case studies: one on providing process guidance in conflict-resolution and negotiations, and another one on applying process modeling to support continuous process improvement and ensure trustworthy elections.

The first case study is a project in collaboration with the National Mediation Board, a government agency that provides mediation and arbitration services. Our purpose is to develop a process definition in the Little-JIL process modeling language that precisely captures the way the NMB conducts mediation. This process definition can be used to provide explicit process guidance to support mediators in the field and train new mediators. To achieve this goal, we have developed a system for online dispute resolution, called STORM2, which provides explicit process guidance; you can see a demo here. What is interesting about the process definition is that as we strive to capture the process accurately and in sufficient detail, we find that mediators often develop their own styles and slightly vary the exact details of the process at lower levels of abstraction. As a result, different process variants must be created because a single process definition cannot precisely model these different "styles." Although each variant is a new process, these processes are related according to prescribed variation relationships so it may be more beneficial to consider them as a family of process definitions (see "Characterizing process variation (NIER Track)," "Categorizing and modeling variation in families of systems: a position paper," and "Representing Process Variation with a Process Family").

The second case study concentrates on modeling election processes and analyzing them for vulnerabilities. There are several different analysis techniques that could be applied;  for example, we can precisely define formal requirements and then use finite-state verification to check if the process adheres to these requirements. What is interesting in this domain is that requirements encompass sometimes conflicting interests--for example, juxtaposing the privacy of the voter against the assurance that no voter casts more than one vote. This issue can easily get very complex when provisional ballots are introduced. For more information, see "Modeling and analyzing faults to improve election process robustness" and "Specifying and Verifying Requirements for Election Processes." This work is being continued under an NSF CISE cross-cutting grant in collaboration with Professor Matt Bishop and his lab at UC Davis. We are currently looking into different analyses that could be applied to the process definition in order to identify improvements in the real-world process.