Vincenzo Gervasi's research interests

I am currently conducting research in a number of (not necessarily so) related topics:

• Requirements Engineering. Requirements engineering focuses on the process of building a complete and consistent description (a requirements document) of the characteristics that a software-intensive system should exhibit in order to solve the customer's problem at which it is targeted. Requirements engineering includes disparate activities like information gathering, models building and analysis, specification, quality and process control, and many others.

  My current research in the field concentrates on the issue of environment support for requirements engineering. Publications on this subject can be found in the Publications section. Among other themes, environment support includes automatic analysis of natural language requirements, together with synthesis, validation, and metrication of models of requirements documents, of software systems described by those requirements, and of requirements writing processes producing those documents. You may find more at The Circe Project site.

  Together with Vincenzo Ambriola and Carlo Montangero, I used to make up the local node of Renoir -- the Requirement Engineering Network of Excellence.

• Software Architecture. Interest in software architecture comes both as a natural extension to requirements analysis (in that certain requirements -- so-called structural requirements -- induce certain architectural constratins in acceptable implementations), and from research in "good" architectures for requirements engineering supporting environments.

• Text and Language. Dealing with software requirements written in natural language, I made some incursion in the field of computational linguistics. The pages dedicated to the CICO parser have more details.

• Software Process. Requirements engineering cannot be understood without any reference to the larger process of which it is part. From time to time, I make some incursion in the field of Software Process Technology, under the umbrella of the EU ESPRIT project PROMOTER.

• Active, Deductive, Heterogeneous Databases. I have investigated active and deductive databases as a tool for developing intelligent applications in the realm of requirements engineering. Some of the results of this investigation have been considered worth publishing on their own merits. You can find more in the Publications section.

• Distributed Algorithms. This strand of my research focuses on the development of distributed algorithms for autonomous, mobile robots under very strict conditions (e.g., no common reference frame, no memory, completely asynchronous behaviour, etc.). Studying the capabilities and limitations of what can be accomplished under such strict conditions allows us to better understand which limitations are fundamental, and which "amenities" (e.g., 1 bit of memory) are really needed to solve certain problems. More information in the Publications section, or in the site of the CORDA Simulator. This work is conducted jointly with Giuseppe Prencipe.