Page type: faculty

Nancy Leveson's Home Page;Nancy Leveson;Department of Computer Science & Engineering;University of Washington;Box 352350 [express mail: Sieg Hall 114];Seattle, WA 98195-2350 USA; +1.206.685.1934; +1.206.543.2969 [FAX]; leveson@cs.washington.edu; Nancy Leveson, Professor, joined the faculty in 1993, coming from;California in search of rain. She received all her degrees, in math;and computer science, from UCLA (Ph.D., 1980) and spent her formative;years being a professor at the University of California, Irvine.;Professor Leveson started a new area of research, software safety, which is;concerned with the problems of building software for real-time systems;where failures can result in loss of life or property. One advantage of;this topic is that nobody questions its goals, except for a few misanthropes;(who don't matter anyway). She and her students have recently produced a;formal requirements specification for TCAS II, a real collision-avoidance;system required on all commercial aircraft in U.S. airspace. One of the;lessons she has learned from this project is never to do anything like it;again. The FAA seems pleased with it though and has adopted it as their;official specification. She and her students are currently working on;doing a safety analysis of the specified behavior of TCAS. She claims that;you should not read anything into the fact that she has been taking the train;a lot lately.;The Safety;Research Project is now also working on modeling and analysis of;automated highways, automobiles,;and various aerospace systems. Subtopics in this research area include;modeling and analysis of safety, specification, safe software design,;software fault tolerance, and verification and validation of safety.;Professor Leveson is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software;Engineering, an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Computing;Research Association, a member of the National Research Council Commission;on Engineering and Technical Systems, and a member of the ACM Committee on;Computers and Public Policy. Recently she chaired a National Research;Council study evaluating the Space Shuttle software process. Dr. Leveson;is a Fellow of the ACM and was awarded the 1995 AIAA Information Systems;Award for contributions in space and aeronautics computer technology and;science for "developing the field of software safety and for promoting;responsible software and system engineering practices where life and property;are at stake.";This year, Dr. Leveson's new book on software safety,;(Safeware: System Safety and Computers, Addison-Wesley, 1995) was;published. Recent papers are available via the web and a list of other papers is;also available. For a copy of my favorite paper (which was actually a keynote;address at the Int. Conf. on Software Engineering in Melbourne) titled;"High-Pressure Steam Engines and Computer Software", click here.;Quals projects are available on the following topics: (1) applying hazard;analysis techniques to an aircraft collision avoidance system model written;in a state-machine-style language (called RSML), (2) determining ways to build;fault trees or other analyses from RSML models in general, (3) designing new;requirements specification languages (including specifying the human-computer;interface) and deriving general principles for designing such languages,;(4) applying hazard analysis to human-machine interface models, (5) modeling;the human-machine interface in control systems (e.g., an aircraft cockpit),;and (6) analyzing aircraft accident reports (involving mode awareness problems;and other general HCI issues) to derive information about safe design of;human-computer interaction.;Try finger (finger leveson@cs.washington.edu) for information about which;city (or airport) I am currently in and perhaps how to contact me.;