Richard Taylor

Director of the Institute for Software Research (ISR) Professor of Information and Computer Sciences Department of Informatics Research Area: Software Engineering Electronic Mail:  taylor 'at sign goes here' uci 'dot goes here' edu ISR Office: ICS2-203 Bren Hall Office: 5216 ( Campus map & directions School maps and directions ) Office Phone: (949) 824-6429 Fax: (949) 824-1715 Mailing Address: Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, California 92697-3440

Last update: July 25, 2008

Biography

Richard N. Taylor is a Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine and a member of the Department of Informatics (of which he was chair from its founding in January of 2003 through June, 2004). He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1980. His research interests are centered on design and software architectures, especially event-based and peer-to-peer systems and the way they scale across organizational boundaries. Professor Taylor is the Director of the Institute for Software Research, which is dedicated to fostering innovative basic and applied research in software and information technologies through partnerships with industry and government. He has served as chairman of ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering, SIGSOFT, chairman of the steering committee for the International Conference on Software Engineering, and was general chair of the 1999 International Joint Conference on Work Activities, Coordination, and Collaboration and the 2004 International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.

Taylor was a 1985 recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator Award and in 1998 was recognized as an ACM Fellow. In 2005 he was awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award.

A PDF version of my August, 2005 resume.
(See the project pages below for web-accessible copies of many of my publications.)

Software Engineering

Recent and Future Events of Note

• ACM SIGSOFT 2008/FSE-16
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• 30th International Conference on Software Engineering: ICSE '08
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• The IMPACT project: "an ongoing initiative whose goal is to determine the impact of software engineering research upon software engineering practice."

Institute for Software Research (ISR)

Established in July 1999, the University of California's Institute for Software Research (ISR) is dedicated to

• fostering innovative basic and applied research in software and information technologies;
• working with established companies, startups, government agencies, and standards bodies to develop and transition the technologies to widespread and practical application;
• educating the next generation of software researchers and practitioners in advanced software technologies;
• supporting the public service mission of the University of California in developing the economic basis of the State of California.

The Institute's activities are focused on:

• Direct support of research projects, including funding personnel
• Research support services (administrative services)
• Conference and seminar services
• Technology transition

Research

My research is focused on design — the issues, techniques, and agents involved in creating and evolving software artifacts and processes. Specific emphases include:

• software architecture: means for designing, organizing, and describing distributed and decentralized applications.
• architecture-based software development environments: tools to support the conceptual approach, ranging from design-time tools to implementation to run-time dynamic adaptation.

The foundational work on architectures has centered on means for describing architectures in various styles and development of new architectural styles (notably the "C2" components-and-connectors style and, with Roy Fielding, the REST style for Internet applications such as the WWW). Current work in this domain is directed at developing, with Rohit Khare, the DECENT style for decentralized applications, and, with a variety of others, novel approaches to creating and applying peer-to-peer architectures.

The environment and tools work has emphases on environment architectures (see the ArchStudio site for details), an extensible software architecture description language and supporting toolkit (see the xADL web site for the details and the download), and architecture-driven dynamic adaptation of applications. Virtually all of this work utilizes event-based approaches. A variety of publications in this area can be found at http://www.isr.uci.edu/architecture/publications.html.

A closely related project is directed at providing hypertext functionality in a comprehensive development environment. The Chimera project provided early results; the effort is now largely centered within Ken Anderson's information integration research group at the University of Colorado.

Earlier work on peer-to-peer architectures led to the Endeavors and Magi secure peer-to-peer infrastructure and tools, now being developed and deployed commercially by Endeavors Technology Inc.

Sample Publications (See full list):

• Richard N. Taylor, Nenad Medvidovic, Kenneth M. Anderson, E. James Whitehead, Jr., Jason E. Robbins, Kari A. Nies, Peyman Oreizy, and Deborah L. Dubrow. A component and message-based architectural style for GUI software. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 22, 6, pp. 390-406 (June, 1996.)
• Roy Fielding, E. James Whitehead, Jr., Kenneth Anderson, Peyman Oreizy, Gregory Bolcer, and Richard Taylor. Web-based Development of Complex Information Products. Communications of the ACM, 41,8, pp. 84-92. (August 1998.)
• Nenad Medvidovic and Richard N. Taylor. A Classification and Comparison Framework for Software Architecture Description Languages. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 70-93 (January 2000).
• Peyman Oreizy, Michael M. Gorlick, Richard N. Taylor, Dennis M. Heimbigner, Gregory F. Johnson, Nenad Medvidovic, Alex Quilici, David S. Rosenblum, Alexander L. Wolf. An Architecture-Based Approach to Self-Adaptive Software. IEEE Intelligent Systems,14, 3, pp. 54–62 (May/June 1999).
• Kenneth M. Anderson, Richard N. Taylor, E. James Whitehead, Jr. Chimera: Hypermedia for Heterogeneous Environments. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 18, 3, pp. 211-245 (July, 2000).
• Roy Fielding and Richard N. Taylor. Principled design of the Modern Web Architecture. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 2, 2, pp. 115-150 (May 2002).
• Eric M. Dashofy, André van der Hoek, Richard N. Taylor. An Infrastructure for the Rapid Development of XML-based Architecture Description Languages. Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2002), Orlando, May 22-24, 2002.
• Rohit Khare and Richard N. Taylor. “Extending the Representational State Transfer (REST) Architectural Style for Decentralized Systems.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), May, 2004, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Design

(Not just software!)

The Proposal for a School of Design at the University of California, Irvine (dated November 2002; PDF format; 188 pages; 8.5M) recommends establishment of a research-based school having an interdisciplinary approach to design and a comprehensive array of degree programs at the bachelor's, master's, and doctoral levels. The proposal is accompanied by a cover letter (dated November 7, 2002; PDF format; 2 pages; 66K) from Professor Richard N. Taylor (ICS), Chair of the School of Design Committee.

(The much shorter document containing only the proposal's title page, table of contents, and executive summary [PDF format; 10 pages; 100K] is also available.)

The School of Design proposal was transmitted to the Irvine Division of the Academic Senate on January 13, 2003.

Software Design

Andre van der Hoek and I wrote an extended paper on the future of software design and architecture, as part of FOSE 2007: Future of Software Engineering.

Graduate Students and Ph.D. Graduates

Ph.D. Graduates

I've had the privilege of supervising the following Ph.D. graduates.

Current Ph.D. Students

The Things that Really Matter

• My Family! This picture is of my wife and myself halfway up the Aiguille du Midi, near Chamonix.
• St. Andrew's Presbyterian is where you'll find me on Sunday. Look for me in the choir singing tenor II. Here's a photo of the St. Andrew's choirs, taken in April of 2002.
• Music: anything baroque, sacred choral music, Rondo Veneziano.
• The mezzotints of John Martin. See, for example, Adam and Eve,The Morning Hymn .
• Most everything French, but especially food and St. Barts . Cannes is wonderful, except during the cheesy film festival...