National University of Singapore

interactions across classes of processes. These domains have centralized or distributed controllers that interact with and coordinate large and dynamically varying classes of client processes that require their services. The design and validation of such systems present unique challenges, since they need to scale to a large (yet unknown) number of interacting processes.

For his work in the area of Formal Specification and Validation, Associate Professor Abhik Roychoudhury has won the IBM Faculty Award 2008. The title of his project is “Validation and Comprehension Methods for Large-scale Systems with Complex Interactions”.

Announced in February 2009, the award carries a cash prize in the form of a research grant. No applications for the award are accepted as candidates have to be nominated by an IBM staff member. Commenting on the award, Prof Roychoudhury said: “In recent years, I have been collaborating with IBM in the area of modelling and testing of complex control systems. IBM has business interests in many of these industries and is well-placed to drive and also derive benefits from innovations in this space.”

Looking beyond what he has done so far, Prof Roychoudhury added: “Moreover, we are exploring the possibility of developing and applying our ideas in a more general context, namely flexible modelling / validation of (parts of) service systems. This again, is of great relevance to IBM with its recent thrust on Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) research and education programmes, and the National University of Singapore (NUS) is a partner in these efforts.”