Associate Professor
Joined School 2001
BSc (UWO),
MSc (UBC),
PhD (UBC)
| nday@uwaterloo.ca | |
| Web | http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~nday |
| Voice | 519-888-4567 x35321 |
| Fax | 519-885-1208 |
|
| Nancy Day
Associate Professor Joined School 2001 BSc (UWO),
|
Professor Day's research is in developing techniques and methodologies to ensure correct system behaviour for software and hardware systems. Her focus is on the use of formal methods, which often uncover subtle bugs that are very difficult to discover using conventional techniques. For example, in the analysis of a separation minima used by air traffic controllers over the North Atlantic Region, Professor Day and her colleagues uncovered three inconsistencies in the specification.
Formal methods involve the analysis of mathematically precise descriptions of how systems behave. Formal methods have an advantage over techniques based on testing or simulation in that they examine all possible behaviours of the system.
Professor Day has worked on applications of formal methods ranging from air traffic control systems to microprocessors. In common amongst these diverse applications is the use of high-level models of system behaviour to conquer the complexity of the problem. The use of appropriate system descriptions is often critical to integrating formal methods into existing system development processes. Professor Day's recent work involves the development of configurable model-driven development tools to support the automatic generation of tool support for notations with customizable semantics.
She has experience developing both automated and interactive formal methods tools. Automated tools face limits on the size of the system that can be analyzed. Interactive techniques require more expertise, but make it possible to handle the complexity through decomposition. Future methodologies will build on the strengths of both approaches.
Professor Day is a founding member of the Waterloo Formal Methods Lab (WatForm), which now consists of five faculty members and over fifteen students. She is also a member of Waterloo's Software Engineering Lab.
Recently, Professor Day's research has involved collaboration with GM Canada and Critical Systems Labs on the detection of feature interactions in advanced automobiles, AT&T on analysis of a telecommunications protocol, and Intel on microprocessor verification. In the past, she has worked with Raytheon Systems Canada and MacDonald Dettwiler Associates to study applications of formal methods to the Canadian Automated Air Traffic System (CAATS). She also consults on the analysis of system safety. During her graduate studies, she spent time working with SRI International in Cambridge, UK and Nortel Networks in Ottawa. After completing her PhD, she spent two years as a Postdoctoral researcher at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI) in Portland, Oregon.
Shahram Esmaeilsabzali, Nancy A. Day, Joanne M. Atlee, and Jianwei Niu, Deconstructing the Semantics of Big-Step Modelling Languages. In Requirements Engineering Journal 15(2) : 235-265. Springer. 2010.
Adam Prout, Joanne M. Atlee, Nancy A. Day, Pourya Shaker, Code Generation for a Family of Executable Modelling Languages. To appear in Journal of Software and Systems Modeling. 2011.
Shahram Esmaeilsabzali, Nancy A. Day, and Joanne M. Atlee. A Common Framework for Synchronization in Requirements Modelling Languages. In Proceedings of ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS). pp. 198-212. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 6395. Springer-Verlag. 2010.
Shahram Esmaeilsabzali and Nancy A. Day. Semantic Quality Attributes for Big-Step Modelling Languages. To appear in Proceeding of Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE). Saarbrucken, Germany. Mar 2011.
A. L. J. Dominguez, Nancy A. Day, and R. T. Fanson. Translating Models of Automotive Features in MatLab's Stateflow to SMV to Detect Feature Interactions. International System Safety Conference (ISSC), 2008.
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519-888-4567 x33293
Fax: 519-885-1208
Contact | Feedback: cs-webmaster@cs.uwaterloo.ca | David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | Faculty of Mathematics
Last modified: Tuesday, 18-Jan-2011 11:10:18 EST
