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Upgrading an industry
NSF taps BU computer scientists to establish software standards

By David J. Craig

Anyone who uses the Internet has considered clicking on the download button of a Web site that offers free software, perhaps for viewing a film online. But is it safe?

As principal investigators of a $1.7 million NSF research project, Azer Bestavros, a CAS computer science associate professor and chairman of the department (left), and Assaf Kfoury, a CAS computer science professor, will create new guidelines for the software development industry that will make computer programs more reliable. Photo by Vernon Doucette

Installing antivirus software protects against hackers, but it is nearly impossible to determine if a program is safe in other important respects, according to Azer Bestavros, even if it comes from a trusted source. The program could consume so much memory, for instance, that it will bog down the computer, or it could contain bugs that will disrupt the machine much like a virus.

"Programs made with good intentions can wreak havoc on your machine," says Bestavros, a CAS computer science associate professor and chairman of the department. "That's why almost all end-user licensing agreements for software say that you're using the product at your own risk. The companies don't want to be liable for the damage the products can cause."

The problem occurs, he says, because the software industry is poorly regulated. Software makers often release programs that work well on personal computers with certain characteristics, but that act unreliably on other machines or when they conflict with certain other programs.

The CAS computer science department recently received a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to work on a solution. Over the next five years, researchers from the department's networking group and its programming languages group will create ways to standardize many aspects of software development. Bestavros and Assaf Kfoury, a CAS computer science professor, are the project's principal investigators.

The grant was announced just days after the department won a $1.8 million NSF grant to create a laboratory for investigating problems associated with the video sensing technology used in security and monitoring systems (see sidebar). The grants are the first department-wide research projects in computer science at BU. Since 1999, the department has grown from 8 faculty members to 17, and has increased its annual external research funding fourfold.

"Traditionally, our department has been very strong in theoretical computer science, and our goal has been to establish ourselves in applied research," says Bestavros. "The NSF grants recognize our strengths in these areas, and really put us on the map as a department."

Researchers studying software safety and reliability will aim to create a way to identify legitimate programs so users know for sure that they will not deliver a virus. The second part of the project -- ensuring the proper function of software -- is trickier.

To understand the researchers' challenge, it is helpful to picture the Internet as one huge computer consisting of several layers of computer programs. Common application programs such as Microsoft Word are built upon a deeper layer of electronic codes called operating systems -- Windows, for instance. Operating systems, in turn, rest on network operating systems, such as TCP/IP, which perform even more basic functions.

Bestavros, who is a networking expert, uses the automobile as an analogy to explain what often goes wrong in software development: imagine if cars required drivers not only to operate gas and brake pedals and a steering wheel, but had a lever to control the firing of spark plugs. Similarly, Bestavros says, most computer programmers have access to too many details of the underlying structure of the Internet, which needlessly complicates their work and allows bugs to sneak into new designs.

By creating stricter, standardized parameters within which programmers work, the BU researchers hope to dramatically reduce the number of mistakes programmers can make.

"In addition to establishing guiding principles that will improve the next generation of computer software, we also need to find safer ways to continue using software that's already out there," says Kfoury, whose expertise is the development of programming languages. A common source of problems, he explains, is when different versions of the same software try to communicate. One goal of the project is to develop methods of testing large classes of software to discover how certain programs can be made to communicate smoothly with one another.

According to Bestavros, a central challenge will be deciding how restrictive to make the parameters in which programmers work. "Making software safer essentially means limiting the freedom of programmers," he says. "By working within limits, they obviously give up some things, such as the ability to check some aspects of the software's safety while they're designing it. There are a lot of compromises that will have to be made, and I think that's where a lot of our work will be."

The $1.7 million NSF grant begins October 1 and will fund five graduate research assistant positions and one postdoctoral researcher for five years.

There's barely an inch of floor space in a modern airport without a security camera trained on it. But are such cameras used to their potential?
Hardly, according to Azer Bestavros, a CAS computer science associate professor and chairman of the department. Most security system cameras are used the same way they were decades ago - to dispatch an image to another location, where several images are monitored by a bleary-eyed guard.

Bestavros says that in conjunction with the right computer technology, however, cameras can perform sophisticated functions, such as watching for types of movement that indicate suspicious activity, and then signaling an alert.

The CAS computer science department recently was awarded a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a sensorium, or a laboratory for developing new ways to use video monitoring technology. Over the next five years, the grant will fund the purchase of net-worked video monitoring equipment as well as a full-time staff person to maintain the equipment.

"We envision that most, if not all, public spaces in the future will be equipped with video sensing devices," says Bestavros. "Already they're in malls, parks, and schools. And they're not used simply for security, but for monitoring patients in a hospital or for seeing when somebody is lost in a park. But they're not used to do very intelligent things."

Intelligent things? Well, think of a camera feeding data into a computer that then calculates what types of movements typically occur in the camera's range of vision. In a hospital registration area, for instance, most moving objects might come in through a particular door, approach a counter, and leave in the same direction.

"A computer can be programmed to recognize when the camera sees a movement that can't easily be classified, and then maybe a red light will go on, telling a security guard at least to look at a particular monitor," Bestavros says. The new facility also could be used to investigate the best way for several cameras to work together to track an individual's movement through a building, or to develop a monitoring system that can find a person based on identifying characteristics such as what the person is wearing. Bestavros says researchers in the computer science department already have completed successful pilot studies in some of these areas.

27 September 2002
Boston University
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