Sebastian Elbaum Receives Prestigious NSF Career Award

Released on 06/03/2004, at 2:00 AM
Office of University Communications
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Lincoln, Neb., June 3rd, 2004 —

Sebastian Elbaum, assistant professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Career Award.

The $400,000 award is titled "Leveraging Field Data to Test Highly-Configurable and Rapidly-Evolving Pervasive Systems" runs through February 2009. With the award, Elbaum will address the challenges presented by the fact that software test engineers cannot predict, much less exercise, the overwhelming number of potential scenarios faced by their software. Instead, they allocate their limited resources based on assumptions about how the software will be employed after release. Yet, the lack of connection between in-house activities and how the software is employed in the field can lead to inaccurate assumptions, resulting in decreased software quality and reliability over the system's lifetime.

The two primary objectives are to design profiling mechanisms for large pools of users and resource-cognizant monitoring schemes to reduce execution overhead; and to develop adaptive testing techniques that continuously characterize software behavior to identify testing inadequacies, realign testing resources, and extend existing test suites to overcome their limitations.

The required educational component of this work aims at bringing an earlier appreciation of the real-world validation problems to the undergraduate classroom and prepare students well-versed in software quality and empirical validation.

The Career Program offers the NSF's most prestigious awards for outstanding faculty early in their independent professional careers. With Elbaum's award, seven of the 20 faculty members in the UNL Department of Computer Science and Engineering are Career awardees.

CONTACT: Sebastian Elbaum, Asst. Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, (402) 472-6748