Usask computer science researchers awarded $350,000 in funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation
The funding will be used for infrastructure in a unique project that merges software maintenance, big-data infrastructure, data science, and visualization to create a model capable of producing robust and trustworthy software in a real-world setting.
Dr. Chanchal Roy and co-applicants Dr. Debajyoti Mondal and Dr. Kevin Schneider have received $350,000 from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to fund a Software Analytics Research Lab. The funding was awarded through CFI’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF), which provides up to 40 per cent of the cost of academic research infrastructure, with remaining funds solicited from other public and private sources. Total funding for the project is $876,735.
The CFI funds will be used on infrastructure consisting of high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, software analytics workstations, large interactive displays, mobile devices, and wearables. This equipment will be used to develop cutting-edge, reliable, secure, sustainable, scalable, and cost-effective software, a standard that most current software fails to meet.
The impacts of errors and bugs caused by current software are extensive. Economically, the cost was estimated at around $1.7 trillion in 2017 alone. Software errors have also led to fatalities, including a software bug in a self-driving car that resulted in a pedestrian fatality in March 2018 and the recent Boeing-737 Max tragedies that resulted in hundreds of deaths. The increased use of software solutions for monitoring complex processes in life-critical scenarios, deep-learning based analytics for scientific computing, and industrial automation have placed reliability and trustworthiness at the frontline of software development.
By developing software that includes a responsive analytics system to monitor all stages of the software lifecycle (including its use in the field) the researchers hope to dramatically improve the quality of software, enable rapid diagnosis and repair of software errors, facilitate speedy stakeholder requested feature integration, and make possible rich analytics to help guide future development.
The research team is also part of the recently awarded USask-led SOAR (Software Analytics Research) NSERC CREATE program. SOAR is an industrial stream graduate program that received over $3.5 million in cash commitments from industry for graduate student support. The project has received additional funding and in-kind contributions totaling more than $13 million.
The research carried out with the infrastructure from the CFI project will feed directly into the SOAR program. SOAR brings together over 20 industry partners to train next-generation software developers and is one of the only graduate programs in Canada targeted at developing software analytics skills.
It is estimated that at least 120 highly qualified personnel will be trained over the next five years through the SOAR program. Undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows will be trained through targeted courses, intensive leadership and professional skills training, industry internships, and an annual industry-focused research symposium.
“With this program, we hope to attract high-quality students who will be provided paid internships in the industry,” Dr. Chanchal Roy said.
“The companies will get to know these students before they graduate. After training them during their studies, companies are likely to pay graduates higher to retain them—which can address the shortage of skilled workers for Saskatchewan’s IT sector, help the economy, and help the university in signature areas of research such as water and food security.”