McSCert

McSCert receives 2024 IEEE Computer Society TCSE Synergy Award

Melissa Alzaeim — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 18:59:08 +0000

Through its global annual awards program recognizing outstanding contributions in the software engineering community, IEEE’s Technical Community on Software Engineering (TCSE) honoured McMaster’s Centre for Software Certification (McSCert) with a Synergy Award.

The award is granted to an organization that stands as a model in the software engineering community of effective partnership between industry and universities. Past Synergy Award winners include Peking University’s Software Engineering Institute, IBM’s Centre for Advanced Studies, Microsoft Research and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Melon.

For 15 years, MsSCert, part of the Faculty of Engineering at McMaster University, has been promoting collaboration and partnerships across various sectors, demonstrating a dedication to advancing standards and practices within the industry, amplifying impact and enhancing technology transfer.

With an overarching goal to improve the practice of software engineering applied to critical systems involving software, McSCert works with various partners to research how to produce software that can be certified and how existing software may be certified. Past partners include Google, Mitacs, General Motors, Stellantis and Rogers.

“McSCert’s research and development work has had significant commercial, economic and societal impact,” says John Preston, Associate Dean of Research, Innovation and Partnerships in McMaster’s Faculty of Engineering. “Through innovative methodologies and tools, McSCert’s research team is reshaping the landscape of software certification, facilitating the development and validation of crucial software application.”

TCSE awards will be presented at the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024) on April 19 in Lisbon, Portugal.

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Cubic Transportation Systems and McMaster University launch Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence and Smart Mobility

Jacqueline Gergal — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 13:10:42 +0000

McSCert is collaborating with Cubic Transportation Systems as part of the Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence and Smart Mobility, led by Dr Ali Emadi. McSCert’s role focuses on providing software and safety critical engineering expertise to support activities related to understanding and addressing performance bottlenecks, improving software architecture, and carrying out predictions related to migration to new technology platforms. McSCert researchers are engaged with a number of other research activities as part of the Centre of Excellence and play a foundational role in supporting software engineering activities throughout.

Cubic Corporation’s Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS) business division and McMaster University are partnering to launch the Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence and Smart Mobility. This long-term program will develop the building blocks to design the future of inclusive mobility through innovation and technology collaboration between government, academia, and the public and private sectors. The program will also train the next generation of engineers, scientists, and leaders through hands-on research and product development with public and private mobility service providers.

Experts at the McMaster Automotive Resource Centre (MARC), one of the most extensive transportation research institutes in North America and headquarters of the new centre, and CTS, the leading provider of transportation and traffic management solutions, will work together to address complex issues facing transportation systems through multidisciplinary research and product development.

In addition to developing the future workforce – including undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and research staff – the program focuses on bringing diversity to product development and innovation while designing the future of mobility.

“Creating this Centre of Excellence delivers an ecosystem dedicated to improving the way people move around their towns and cities through the advancement of transportation technology and products,” said Galen Chui, senior vice president of engineering, CTS. “Data analytics, computer vision, and machine learning are our technical areas of focus while our design foundation centers around accessibility and inclusion to ensure mobility works for all citizens.”

In this platform, students will have the opportunity to participate in projects from research through to implementation in areas such as leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques for integrating and controlling smart devices, infrastructure, traffic, and environmental conditions to improve and optimize mobility as a whole. Other research will develop scenario simulations to help build, test, and validate innovations before real-world implementation.

“The partnership between Cubic and McMaster University emphasizes the necessity of incorporating EDI into transportation system development,” said Arig al Shaibah, associate vice-president, equity and inclusion, McMaster University. “Keeping principles of inclusive excellence at the forefront of research projects will drive innovation, and with this partnership, will result in moving toward a future of electrification and automation that is more accessible, sustainable, and better reflects the world and people around us.”

“This initiative speaks directly to Dr. Emadi’s reputation as a leader in the automotive and transportation industry and allows our students and faculty to develop cutting-edge solutions with our partners,” added Karen Mossman, McMaster’s vice-president, research. “This collaboration with Cubic will lead to new and innovative technologies that will both advance the industry and benefit society.”

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McSCert project to help assure the safety of focused ultrasound medical device

Jacqueline Gergal — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 14:29:47 +0000

Kim Arnott

Imagine a version of surgery that could remove diseased tissue without the need for cutting.

That’s the promise of focused ultrasound therapy, a revolutionary, non-invasive way to treat a range of medical conditions by precisely targeting tissue deep in the body.

Burlington-based Arrayus Technologies is developing a novel medical device to bring that therapy to cancer patients. But demonstrating the safety of such a new and complex software-based device is a challenging task, particularly for a small company.

An alliance between the McMaster Centre for Software Certification (McSCert) and Arrayus will bring the device one step closer to market, while also pioneering new software and safety engineering techniques to test the safety of software-intensive medical devices.

Traditional approaches to assuring medical device safety can be both inefficient and inadequate, says Arrayus CEO James O’Reilly. He sees model-based engineering (MBE) as a new route to evaluating hazards in the industry.

That led him to connect with McSCert experts who have developed tools to demonstrate the safety, security and dependability of software systems in safety-critical areas such as the nuclear and automotive industries.

“With the level of complexity of our system, we require new methodologies that effectively capture the entirety of our hazards analysis,” says O’Reilly. “We’ll also benefit from having an independent third-party analysis that gets us away from our own confirmation bias.”

The collaboration offers an exciting opportunity to work with a team building a novel safety-critical system, says Richard Paige, director of McSCert.

“Arrayus needs us to help them understand the best way forward through regulation and safety, but we benefit from working with a really interesting system that will allow our students and researchers to learn more about embedded systems and medical devices.”

“This is a really good synergistic relationship that we’re very happy to have identified.”

The project, which has received funding support from NSERC, will help Arrayus move closer to Health Canada certification and the eventual marketing of its device. But new safety tools also offer significant benefits to Canada’s growing medical device industry, particularly small to medium-sized companies for whom the cost of certification is a tremendous financial burden and risk, says Paige.

The biggest benefit may eventually be to patients, who can suffer devastating consequences when medical device software failures aren’t noted or corrected.

“By improving the techniques used to assure the safety of these devices, McSCert’s expertise will help maintain public confidence in the technologies that offer such tremendous potential benefits to society,” says John Preston, associate dean, research, innovation and external relations with the Faculty of Engineering.

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Computing and Software professor awarded $4 million to develop mobile health solutions and expertise in Ontario

Jacqueline Gergal — Tue, 30 May 2023 14:30:45 +0000

Kim Arnott

There was no disputing the growing importance of mobile technologies in the world of health care. And then came the pandemic.

Back in 2019, Richard Paige, professor of Computing and Software and director of the McMaster Centre for Software Certification (McSCert), applied for funding for an ambitious five-year project to advance mobile health in Ontario. Word that he was awarded $4 million from the Ontario Research Fund – Research Excellence Program came out earlier this month.

Pandemic restrictions may have highlighted the need for digital and virtual access to health care, but Paige says innovation is essential for improving services to the province’s diverse and remote populations.

“If you’re in northern Ontario, it might be two or three hours to your nearest clinic or nearest GP,” he says. “It may be that the weather conditions simply prohibit you from traveling, in which case having mobile digital means to engage with health care is extremely important.”

Mobile health technologies promise to improve how people can monitor their health, communicate with providers, provide lab samples and get test results. Machine learning offers even greater possible benefits to patients and the industry.

Paige’s project will team up researchers with industry partners looking to create and improve mobile health technologies. He says the partners range from larger hardware and infrastructure companies to smaller organizations wanting to develop specific mobile solutions, such as processing x-rays or sharing lab results.

One aim of the project is to find ways to lower the entry costs and barriers to building safe and secure mobile health applications, to allow local startups and small companies to work in the growing and lucrative space.

The project will also expand the province’s pool of skilled researchers and engineers.

“To my mind, producing highly trained personnel that can work in this space is the biggest measure of success,” says Paige. “We want to have a whole spectrum of people working on this from undergraduate all the way up to postdoctoral and research engineer levels and really grow expertise and capability in Ontario in this discipline.”

A collaboration with Sheridan College’s Centre for Mobile Innovation, led by its director, Dr Ed Sykes, the project has recently launched with about a half-dozen summer interns working on projects including initial experiments, technology assessments and initial literature reviews.

Several PhD and master’s students have been recruited and a postdoctoral student will join the team this fall, as the project ramps up.

“I expect the first year will be building on things that exist already and use those to develop our tools, our infrastructure and our knowledge,” said Paige. “In the second and third year we’ll move to newer things, pie-in-the-sky grand ideas that the companies have that perhaps they haven’t been able to tackle before because it didn’t have all of the knowledge and expertise in-house, but we’ll now be able to help with that.”

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Federal government invests $10M in McMaster automotive and aerospace electrification hub

Jacqueline Gergal — Thu, 18 May 2023 14:31:31 +0000

This funding will enable McSCert to develop novel methods and tools for software development and functional safety of electrified and autonomous vehicles, focusing on model-based software development and safety analysis of systems incorporating machine learning components.

McMaster has been awarded $10 million from FedDev Ontario to support an integrated automotive, aerospace and advanced manufacturing network.

Known as iHub, the state-of-the-art facility will expand the existing facilities at McMaster Innovation Park and will leverage another $16.8 million from industry partners including Ford, Honda, Bombardier, Stellantis (Fiat Chrysler) and MHI – RJ Aviation Group, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

The funding was announced today by the Honourable Filomena Tassi, Minister of Labour and MP for Hamilton West-Ancaster Dundas.

Five McMaster engineers – Ali Emadi, Saeid Habibi, Mark Lawford, Ravi Selvaganapathy and Stephen Veldhuis – are leading the initiative, designed to strengthen the capacity and capabilities of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt new technologies to better position themselves in an increasing digital and electrified economy.

Together they will develop, test and incorporate the latest technologies required for the production of next-generation electric and autonomous vehicles and energy-efficient and intelligent aircraft.

Ali Emadi, Canada Research Chair in Transportation Electrification and Smart Mobility and NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Electrified Powertrains, says iHub is a gamechanger for both academic and industry research and innovation and builds on McMaster’s electrification expertise.

“This funding will allow us to step up our game and support the ecosystem in Southern Ontario in an unprecedented way,” he said. “It will allow a wide range of automotive and aerospace companies – from start-ups to SMEs to OEMs – to bring innovative solutions to the market faster and position Canada as a global leader.”

McMaster President, David Farrar, saluted the federal government for its investment that will allow McMaster researchers to build on their successful track record of partnering with industry.

“We’re grateful for the opportunity to advance our work with Canadian manufacturers in automotive and aerospace electrification,” he said. “This investment will enable economic recovery by connecting our manufacturers and SMEs, providing training and access to technology, and commercializing new products.”

As a central resource, iHub will connect participants with large automotive and aerospace manufacturers that require solutions, expanding opportunities for local suppliers from across southern Ontario to integrate into global supply chains. It is expected to support more than 230 SMEs, spanning the manufacturing corridor from Windsor to Oshawa, facilitate commercialization of 100 new products and services, and create significant employment.

“Today’s investment will boost our economy by supporting almost 170 local jobs and helping Canadian innovators succeed in a thriving industry,” said Tassi, who made the announcement of behalf of the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages and Minister responsible for FedDev Ontario.

“iHub will position Hamilton as a global destination for electric automotive and aerospace technologies, while providing direct industry training for at least 200 highly qualified personnel to ensure that our workforce is at the forefront of these technologies for years to come.”

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McMaster Engineering researchers awarded funding to advance software safety for next-generation vehicles

Jacqueline Gergal — Wed, 10 May 2023 14:37:47 +0000

McMaster Engineering researchers have initiated a $2 million project to work with General Motors Canada (GM Canada) to develop methods to help ensure the safety and reliability of autonomous and electrified vehicles.

Mark Lawford, Director of the McMaster Centre for Software Certification (McSCert), and his collaborators received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Ontario Centres of Excellence and GM Canada.

Within the context of the automotive industry’s ongoing development of new and complex software technologies for vehicles, GM Canada’s goal is to be at the forefront of establishing model management-based techniques to address software safety and compliance with standards, thus improving industry practice.

That’s where Lawford and his research team come in.

“With the addition of software-enabled hybrid powertrains and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, the system design and safety processes of vehicles have had a corresponding increase in required effort, difficulty and cost,” explains Lawford. “To help GM Canada address this issue, we are developing methods and tools to help ensure safety for new GM Canada products while reducing the time and cost associated with software safety activities. This will, in part, be done by helping GM engineers determine when safety evidence from previous vehicles can be reused in developing a new vehicle.”

Lawford is joined by McMaster Department of Computing and Software Professors, Tom Maibaum and Alan Wassyng and University of Toronto Computer Science Professor, Marsha Chechik on the project. The team is working to model design and safety artefacts and their relationships with the safety case, the complete argument demonstrating the functional safety of the system. The work will also include the development of methods to help GM engineers determine the impact of a design change on the safety case. From there, engineers can determine which parts of it can be appropriately reused.

“We’re excited to work with the McMaster Centre for Software Certification research team again,” said Brian Tossan, Director, Canadian Technical Centre, GM Canada. “Not only are they global leaders in software safety research and certification, the team is also highly skilled at understanding our needs and providing practical solutions to address them.”

“NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Development Grants create and support partnerships that economically, socially or environmentally benefit Canada and Canadians,” said Dr. Marc Fortin, Vice-President, Research Partnerships at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. “The already well-established collaboration between McMaster Centre for Software Certification research team and GM Canada has demonstrated extensive expertise in the area of safety and reliability of autonomous and electrified vehicles. We are proud to support them as they strive to improve industry practice.”

The McMaster Centre for Software Certification (McSCert) is a world leader in development and evaluation of safety-critical embedded software systems. McSCert’s partners are active in markets where software failure can have serious consequences, including automotive, medical device, financial and nuclear power industries.

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McSCert’s Signature Tool has been selected as MathWorks File Exchange Pick of the Week

Jacqueline Gergal — Mon, 01 May 2023 14:36:58 +0000

McSCert’s Signature Tool has been selected as Matlab Central Pick of the Week. The Signature Tool extracts the signature of a Simulink subsystem. A signature represents the interface of a Simulink subsystem, including the subsystem’s explicit ports, as well as subsystem’s hidden (implicit) data flow. The signature of a Simulink subsystem helps the user understand the subsystem’s explicit and implicit data flow. Further, the tool assists a developer in identifying if the system’s modular structure has been broken, and offers a metric that can be utilized to assess and improve system design quality. Also, the tool can be used to automatically generate parts of software documentation.

Matlab and Simulink, by MathWorks, are widely used in both industry and academia to solve complex problems in aerospace, automotive and other application domains. Users can submit and share their Matlab applications, functions, models, and other creations to MathWorks’ online archive called Matlab Central File Exchange. There are presently over 28,000 contributions, with a continued growth rate at approximately 100 submissions per month. The File Exchange Pick of the Week is a weekly blog highlighting the “best user submissions,” as chosen by engineers from MathWorks.

Congratulations to McSCert developers of the Signature Tool, Bennett MacKenzie, Gordon Marks, Jeff Ong, Alexandre Korobkine, Steven Postma, Monika Jaskolka, Marc Bender, Vera Pantelic, Mark Lawford and Alan Wassyng.

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McSCert’s Line-Goto/From Tool has been selected as MathWorks File Exchange Pick of the Week

Jacqueline Gergal — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 14:36:31 +0000

McSCert’s Line-Goto/From Tool, has been selected as Matlab Central Pick of the Week. The tool quickly converts Simulink’s signal lines to Goto/From connections, and vice versa, helping increase Simulink model readability, and saving developers time with a common model development activity.

Congratulations to McSCert developers of the Line-Goto/From Tool, Monika Jaskolka and Bennett MacKenzie.

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McSCert’s Simulink-to-Stateflow Tool selected as MathWorks’ Pick of the Week

Jacqueline Gergal — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 14:35:53 +0000

McSCert’s tool Simulink-to-Stateflow has been selected as File Exchange Pick of the Week* by MathWorks. The tool was developed during a collaboration with a large automotive OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). The Simulink-to-Stateflow tool refactors stateful logic implemented with Simulink block diagrams into Stateflow state charts. It is intended for use on fixed-step discrete block diagrams, such as those used to generate embedded software. The tool can be downloaded here:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/70317-simulink-to-stateflow

For more on the tool, including its theoretical foundations, an interested reader is referred to:

Wynn-Williams, S., Diskin, Z., Pantelic, V., Lawford, M., Selim, G., Milo, C., Diab, M., Weslati, F., “SL2SF: Refactoring Simulink to Stateflow,” In 22nd International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 11424, Springer, Cham, 264–281, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16722-6_15.

*Matlab and Simulink, by MathWorks, are widely used in both industry and academia to solve complex problems in aerospace, automotive and other application domains. Users can submit and share their Matlab applications, functions, models, and other creations to MathWorks’ online archive called Matlab Central File Exchange. There are presently close to 40,000 contributions, with a continued growth rate at approximately 100 submissions per month. The File Exchange Pick of the Week is a weekly blog highlighting the “best user submissions,” as chosen by engineers from MathWorks.”

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McSCert grad student creates technology to make web more accessible for blind users

Jacqueline Gergal — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 14:34:58 +0000

Jessie Park

Online information needs to be made more accessible for visually impaired users, especially in a time where virtual spaces are used more than ever – that’s the mission behind Guy Meyer’s research.

During Meyer’s final year as a Mechatronics Engineering student in 2017, he became passionate about advancing technologies for people with visual impairments after Dr. Kourosh Sabri, an ophthalmologist from the Faculty of Health Sciences, visited his capstone class to speak about the challenges faced by his patients.

“Access to information is a right,” says Meyer. “I wanted the focus of my work to be developing tools for the masses where inclusivity is the priority, and not an afterthought.”

This drive led Meyer to pursue his Master’s in Computing and Software, where he’d deep dive into the world of assistive devices for web navigation. Over the last two years, he focused on search engines and developed SerpUI – Search Engine Results Page User Interface, a free search engine tool that simplifies the Google search engine interface.

“I wanted to create a new tool that would improve the user experience of someone who is visually impaired, by making it faster and easier to navigate the web,” says Meyer, who recently completed his master’s program with guidance from Dr. Alan Wassyng, Dr. Mark Lawford, Dr Shahram Shirani and Dr. Sabri. “This is especially important now that most teaching and learning is happening in virtual spaces.”

Meyer is now collaborating with Dr. Sabri to develop a tool that would allow eye assessments to be completed by physicians remotely from patients’ homes.

“We ended up developing a remote testing room, where the patient would see a blank screen on their computer and Dr. Sabri could dispatch tests and assess them virtually,” Meyer says. “There’s so much potential to a technology like this, both for visually impaired people and the professionals who care for them.”

How SerpUI works

SerpUI is designed to minimize the steps needed for a visually impaired user to make a simple search on Google. The user speaks into their computer’s microphone describing what they want to search on Google, while a real-time speech-to-text algorithm powered by Google Cloud Services prompts the user to verify their search item. The background will then change to a vibrant blue and the user will hear a loud “Ding” sound once the search item is successfully submitted.

Then, the user is redirected to SerpUI where the Google search results are presented in high contrast with interactive audio feedback. To flip through results, the user can either use their keyboard or a Nintendo JoyCon controller connected via Bluetooth.

“Great designs tend to impress us by their simplicity,” says Dr. Wassyng, one of Meyer’s supervisors on SerpUI. “Guy succeeded in taking a complex task that depends on the user’s ability to follow visual clues and making it simple and predictable enough for visually impaired kids to use. They can use this solution to perform complex tasks that may otherwise be much more difficult for them.”

Learning from the end-user

Meyer’s projects, SerpUI and the virtual assessment room, were made possible by feedback and consultations with field experts who have lived experience or work with visually impaired students.

Ka Yat Li, a kinesiology student at York University who is blind, and Valerie Kitazaki, a vision resource teacher with the York Region District School Board (YRDSB) were instrumental in informing what factors to consider in Meyer’s designs.

“Hearing Guy’s ideas about web access was definitely interesting because there’s a lot we can improve on. Platforms like Instagram, which are image-heavy, are difficult to navigate because screen readers and assistive technology is mostly designed for text. It’s always been a big issue making sure that different materials are presented in an accessible way,” says Li, who uses tools like an open-source screen reader and braille embosser to complete his coursework in kinesiology.

“It’s only been acknowledged that it’s such a big issue when the pandemic hit – when a lot of people suddenly had to access their content digitally. We’re starting to see more companies recognize this and ask for help, which is good to see. At the same time, there’s a knowledge gap in developing websites and apps to be inclusive of blind users,” he adds.

Kitazaki is one of 16 vision resource teachers in the YRDSB and specializes in teaching orientation and mobility skills for blind and visually impaired students.

“The job of the vision teacher is to communicate with the classroom teacher on how to make documents accessible – for example, documents on Google Classroom during remote learning,” says Kitazaki. “As a vision resource teacher thinking about students, I’d love to see something come out of this project so that more visually impaired students can use it.”

As part of the Computing and Software Capstone class in 2019, Li and Kitazaki led a “Day of Innovation” where students learned how visually impaired users access different technologies to navigate physical and virtual spaces.

“Trying to make tools more affordable and giving people different options is super important, and I think the open-source approach is valuable because there’s more collaboration between users and developers,” says Li.

Meyer also visited the W. Ross Macdonald School in Brantford, a school designed for blind and deafblind students, to learn about what visually impaired students have access to and what can be improved.

“One of the most interesting aspects of Guy’s work is that while his advisors thought that the problem visually impaired youth needed help with was navigation of physical spaces, Guy went out and talked to them, listened and learned that what they really wanted was a way to better navigate cyberspace,” says Lawford, Chair of Computing and Software, McMaster Engineering.

“This is a very human project. We ended up taking a very old problem and starting from the bottom because there’s not much that exists yet for it,” Meyer says.

Check out SerpUI’s open-source codebase here.

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