Hausi A. Müller
Hausi A. Müller
Hausi A. Müller
Professor PhD PEng LMIEEE FCAE FCSSE
Department of Computer Science
Faculty of Engineering
University of Victoria

Last updated
March 2021


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IEEE & IEEE Computer Society

2021 General Chair, IEEE Quantum Week 2021 October 18-22, 2021 in Broomfield, Colorado, USA aka IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)

2020 General Chair, IEEE Quantum Week 2020 October 12-16, 2020 Virtual Event

2019-21 Co-Chair, IEEE Future Directions Quantum Initiative

2019-21 Member, IEEE Conferences Committee

2019 Member, IEEE Conference Publications Committee

2016-18 Vice President, IEEE Computer Society Technical and Conferences Activities (T&C) Board

Quantum Computing and Engineering

IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing & Engineering (QCE)

I am General Chair of IEEE Quantum Week 2021 & 2020, the inaugural IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing & Engineering (QCE20). IEEE Quantum Week aims to bring together quantum professionals, researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, champions and enthusiasts to exchange and share their experiences, challenges, research results, innovations, applications, pathways and enthusiasm on all aspects of quantum computing, engineering and technologies. IEEE Quantum Week invites contributions and participation from the international quantum community to form an exceptional program with outstanding keynotes, technical paper presentations, technical briefings, informative tutorials, community-building workshops, collocated events, exciting posters, and world-class exhibits. IEEE Quantum Week aims to showcase quantum research, practice, applications, education, and training including programming systems, software engineering methods & tools, algorithms, benchmarks & performance metrics, hardware engineering, architectures, & topologies, software infrastructure, hybrid computing, simulating chemical, physical and biological systems, optimization, machine learning.

IEEE Future Directions Quantum Initiative (FD-QI)

Together with Erik DeBenedictis, Candace Culhane, and Travis Humble, I am co-chair of IEEE FD-QI. IEEE Quantum is a new IEEE Future Directions initiative launched in 2019 that serves as IEEE's leading community for all projects and activities on quantum technologies. IEEE Quantum is supported by leadership and representation across IEEE Societies and Organizational Units. We orchestrated a IEEE Quantum Meeting in Gaitherburg, Maryland in May 2019. We are working on IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE20) or IEEE Quantum Week 2020 to be held Oct 12-16, 2020 in Denver-Broomfield, Colorado, USA.

Quantum Problem Solving and Algorithm Design on the IBM Q Platform

Together with Ulrike Stege, Mehdi Bozzo-Rey, and John Longbottom, we work on a Quantum IBM CAS project concentrating on four research avenues: (1) develop a toolkit to identify quantum computing problems and their hybrid problems; (2) develop quantum computing problem solving and algorithm design techniques for selected application domains; (3) develop quantum software for selected problems using IBM Q infrastructure and programming frameworks including Qiskit, Terra and Aqua; and (4) train graduate and undergraduate students by providing them with the IBM Q experience.

IoT and CPS Research

Technical Program Committee Co-Chair, World Forum on Internet of Things WF-IoT 2018 and WF-IoT 2015

Co-Organizer of With Fuyuki Ishikawa and Marin Litoiu, SENCPS NII Shonan Meeting — Software Engineering and Networked Control for Smart Cyber Physical Systems.

Cyber physical systems (CPS) are smart, distributed, software-intensive systems that control tightly integrated computational and physical components. These systems involve a high degree of complexity at numerous spatial and temporal scales and control software and physical components with networked communications. CPS technologies are becoming the key enablers for how we control and build smarter engineered systems, such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities and buildings, renewable energy systems, personalized health care, medical devices, water management systems, and food supply chains. It is imperative to position Canada at the forefront in this industrial revolution.
The goal of my research program is to understand and enhance the capabilities that can be added to humans and machines with tightly integrated networked control. There are many challenges that must be addressed in CPS foundations to be able to harvest its rich economic opportunities. I will investigate scientific foundations and technologies towards a CPS control and systems science (CSS) to analyse and design CPS that are controlled through real-time, networked feedback loops. CSS will provide a platform to analyse, design, simulate, optimize, validate, and verify CPS. A CPS modifies its behaviour at runtime in response to changes within the system or its physical environment. The fulfilment of CPS requirements must be guaranteed even in the presence of adaptations. Traditionally, confidence in the correctness of a system is gained through analyses performed at design time. In the case of CPS, some assurance tasks must be performed at runtime. This calls for methods and techniques that enable continuous CPS assurance throughout its life cycle. A model at runtime (MART) is a causally connected self-representation of the associated system that emphasizes its structure, behaviour, and goals from a problem space stages is no longer apparent. My objective is to explore MART for different aspects of concrete application domains to deal with CPS dynamics to provide effective techniques for analysing, guaranteeing and predicting CPS properties.
The societal impact of CPS is enormous. Advances in the interconnected capabilities of CPS affect virtually every engineered system. The technologies emerging from combining the cyber and physical worlds will provide an innovation and incubation engine for a broad range of industries—creating entirely new markets and platforms for years to come. CPS are advanced technology systems that require knowledge and training for their development and operation. A skilled workforce to support future CPS is a challenge in its own right and of strategic importance. 

Situation-aware and context-aware smart software systems

We investigate methods and frameworks for building context-aware smart commerce systems. We developed (1) the concept of Personal Context Sphere (PCS), (2) the context management infrastructure SmarterContext, and (3) the SmarterDeals recommendation engine for electronic commerce. For PCS and SmarterContext, we won the 2011 IBM Canada CAS Research Project of the Year Award. For SmarterDeals we won the CASCON 2012 Best Paper Award. Villegas’ dissertation on Situation-Aware Smart Software Systems was nominated for the Governor General's Gold Medal, CAGS/UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award, and ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Software engineering for self-adaptive systems (SAS)

We contributed several innovative frameworks, reference models, architectures, methods and algorithms in SAS. I am a founder of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS). I was General Chair for SEAMS 2012 in Zürich. I co-organized three international workshops on Engineering Adaptive Software Systems (EASSy 2013 and EASSy 2015) in Shonan, Japan and Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems (SEfSAS 2013) in Dagstuhl, Germany. In 2017, I am co-organizing SENCPS, an NII Shonan Meeting on Software Engineering and Networked Control for Smart Cyber Physical Systems. Our SAS research contributions include our (1) framework for evaluating quality-driven SAS, (2) DYNAMICO reference model, (3) classification of SAS problems to guarantee solution qualities, and (4) frameworks for context-aware applications.

Ground-breaking SAS evaluation framework

Researchers proposed many diverse software approaches and strategies to modify the behaviour of a managed system. In our paper entitled “A Framework for Evaluating Quality-Driven Self-Adaptive Software Systems,” we proposed a classification of self-adaptive systems spanning the spectrum from control-based to software engineering-based approaches. This SAS evaluation framework is based on our survey of self-adaptive systems papers and a set of adaptation properties derived from control theory. We mapped these properties to measurable software quality attributes. This framework is highly useful for architects and designers of self-adaptive systems. Many researchers in the SAS research community have used this paper to assess their own proposed architectures.

DYNAMICO reference model

Our 2013 DYNAMICO paper is ground-breaking and has been used by other research groups. DYNAMICO improves the engineering of self-adaptive systems by addressing (i) the management of adaptation properties and goals as control objectives; (ii) the separation of concerns among feedback loops; and (iii) the management of dynamic context as an independent control function. Our 2013 paper “Improving Context-awareness in Self-adaptation using DYNAMICO” presents a realization of DYNAMICO comprising our SmarterContext monitoring infrastructure and the QOS-CARE adaptation framework in a self-adaptation solution that maintains its context-awareness relevance. The results of the evaluation demonstrate the applicability, feasibility, and effectiveness of DYNAMICO.

Classification of SAS problems to guarantee solution qualities

We collaborated with theoretical computer scientists, Srinivasan and Stege, to classify SAS problems. We observed that many SAS problems are solved using algorithms based on the Greedy technique resulting in excellent performance. In practice SAS operators adjust policies at runtime to optimize the behaviour of SAS. Research challenge: Can we identify SAS problems for which the greedy approach leads to optimal solutions? Our contributions: (1) A mathematical formulation for SAS optimization problems involving utility-function, goal, and action policies. (2) A mathematical framework that adds structure to the underlying optimization problem for different types of policies. (3) Evaluation of the applicability of our framework using real-world SAS optimization problems including resource allocation, quality of service management, and SLA profit optimization. Our innovative approach helps designers of SAS formulate optimization problems, decide on algorithmic strategies based on policy requirements, and reason about solution qualities.

Smart applications frameworks

As part of the SAVI NSERC Strategic Network and IBM CAS projects, my research group developed several smart applications frameworks SmarterContext, Yakkit \xxxx& Billboard, PALTask, Kaleidoscope—context-aware video streaming infrastructure, and dynamic web services. Yakkit is a context-aware content delivery system that runs on mobile devices. Yakkit offers two location-based services: virtual billboards and location based chat. Virtual billboards allow anyone to pin messages to locations on a map, where other users are able to see and interact with them. Researchers have built Yakkit apps for many different applications and domains. Kaleidoscope generates context-aware video contents using Edge & Core resources to test Future Internet infrastructure with respect to latency and throughput.

Research Team

Together with my research group at the University of Victoria and in collaboration with IBM Canada, CA Canada, SAVI NSERC Strategic Research Network, Canadian Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER),and the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI), I investigate methods, models, architectures, techniques, and feedback loops for autonomic, self-managing, self-adaptive, diagnosis, and SOA governance systems. In 2006 I received the IBM Faculty Fellow of the Year Award and the CSER Outstanding Leadership Award. My research is sponsored by NSERC, CSER, IBM Corporation, CA Inc., and the University of Victoria.

SAVI

 I was a principal investigator in SAVI, an NSERC Strategic Research Network for Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure (2011-2016). The main research goal of the SAVI Network is to address the design of future applications platforms built on a flexible, versatile and evolvable infrastructure that can readily deploy, maintain, and retire the large-scale, possibly short-lived, distributed applications that will be typical in the future applications marketplace. The SAVI partnership involves investigators from nine Canadian universities and 13 companies bringing together expertise in networking, cloud computing, applications, and business.

TCSE

I was Chair of IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE), 2011-2015.  TCSE serves a valuable role in the international software engineering community for academic researchers and industry professionals. Its portfolio includes over 25 software engineering conferences and workshops. Key priorities of TCSE include strong support for its publications, conferences, and workshops; leadership in software engineering education and international outreach; an active role in public policy issues; and good relations with other software engineering societies and regional associations.

BSENG: Bachelor of Software Engineering

I was the founding Director of the Bachelor of Software Engineering (BSEng) degree program in the Faculty of Engineering (2003-07) and the chief architect of the BSENG curriculum (2002-07).

Tool Building Experience

Over the last 30 years, we accumulated significant software engineering research tool building experience. This experience is distilled in the dissertations of Holger Kienle and Kenny Wong. Jochen Stier developed Geist3D, a visualization engine for simulating mechatronics systems during his PhD studies. Johannes Martin's dissertation produced Ephedra, a C/C++ to Java software transformation environment based on our experience with IBM transforming PL/IX programs to C++. The ACRE project produced a series of reverse engineering tools built on commercial products, including Visio, Lotus Notes, Excel, Adobe GoLive, and SVG. During her PhD studies Peggy Storey developed the first version of the highly acclaimed SHriMP visualization system. For his dissertation, Kenny Wong distilled the experiences gained in our reverse engineering projects with IBM CAS into the Reverse Engineering Notebook. Our most famous system is Rigi, which evolved from a programming-in-the-large tool to an end-user programmable environment for software reverse engineering, exploration, visualization, and redocumentation.

Industrial Experience

My industrial experience includes consultancies and research projects with IBM Toronto (1991-present), SEI (1995-present), CA Canada Inc. (2005-present), SAP Business Objects (2005-present), Klocwork Solutions (1998-2004), and other companies. I was the founding president of Hypersystems Technologies Inc. (1997-2001). I gathered much of my motivation for software engineering research while developing power control, supervision, and distribution systems at ASEA Brown Boveri (ABB) in Switzerland (1979-82).

Personal

My spouse, Professor Ulrike Stege, is Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria. I enjoy hiking and traveling with Ulrike, skiing with my children Curtis and Brian, singing and guitar playing at CSER meetings, Dagstuhl and Shonan seminars, and Computer Society and Victoria Swiss Society events, as well as playing soccer with my Gorden Head team.


 

FAVORITES
 

Whistler 2016
Hiking at Whistler 2016
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Brian-Hausi-Whistler-2016
Hiking at Whistler 2016
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Canada-Day-2016
Canada Day 2016
read more: Victoria

Mt. Fuji
Climbing Mt. Fuji 2015
read more: Shonan

IBM CAS Synergy Award 2006
IBM CAS NSERC Leo Derikx Synergy Award 2006
read more: NSERC, IBM CAS

Computing Pioneers 2005
Pioneers of Computing in Canada 2005
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WCRE Soccer Tournament 2006
WCRE 2006 Soccer Tournament, Benevento, Italy
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Skiing Mt. Washington 2006
Skiing at Mt. Washington, BC, 2006
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Skiing Lake Louise 2007
Skiing at Lake Louise, Alberta, 2007
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