Research Partnerships

Partnerships can take many forms, and may have a variety of objectives. In some cases companies financially sponsor a specific research project which is conducted at UCI. In some cases the focus is on transitioning technology from UCI to the company, with UCI investigators both helping in the transition and then working with company to assess the benefits of the technology. Other projects may focus on UCI usage of corporate technology, either in the context of classroom usage or use in a research project. Still others are directed at site visits for information exchange, consulting, or arranging summer internships for students. UCI researchers are also actively engaged in several key standards bodies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Relationships with UCI researchers involved in these groups may be focused on helping to determine appropriate strategies to take.

IRUS provides forums to help establish these relationships. At technical roundtable meetings, for instance, companies may become aware of IRUS faculty leading research efforts in areas of key concern to the companies. IRUS can also arrange briefings at corporate sites to further assist in identifying avenues for cooperation.

The following examples of recent partnerships indicates a few of the many different relationships between IRUS corporate sponsors and IRUS faculty members.

With The Boeing Company we are conducting a longitudinal study of the introduction of group support technologies throughout the organization. This began with a study of the roll out of Exchange and Schedule Plus and is continuing with studies of more advanced virtual collocation technologies.

With Rockwell we are studying the application of design critics to software requirements engineering. One goal of this project is to modify our software design environment to support a specific style of formal requirements of interest to Rockwell, called CoRE. The UCI software design environment supports designers with "cognitive" features such as reminding, criticisms, and multiple perspectives.

With Sun Microsystems we are studying the design and use of group support technologies within Sun at Bay Area sites. These studies are spanning the rollout of Network Computers and HotJava Views within Sun.

With Hughes we have developed an integrated toolset for specifying and testing complex software-intensive systems. This toolset combines and refines several advanced technologies, including capabilities for specifying and reasoning about temporal properties, automated test execution, formal behavior verification, and test adequacy measurement.

With Northrop-Grumman we have investigated the application of heterogeneous hypermedia technologies to assist with problems of software systems evolution. In particular, hypermedia links are used to help capture and access design rationale and traverse the many relationships between artifacts produced during software development.

UC MICRO Program

Research Emphases and Projects

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