Leon J. Osterweil
Leon J. Osterweil
Professor Emeritus
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003
Phone: (413) 545-2186
Fax: (413) 545-1249
Prof. Leon J. Osterweil is a Professor Emeritus in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a Fellow of the ACM, and has won three ACM-SIGSOFT Lifetime Achievement Awards–for Research, Teaching, and Service. He has been an ACM Lecturer, and has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Software and ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. His paper suggesting the idea of process programming was recognized as the Most Influential Paper of the 9th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 9), awarded as a 10-year retrospective. Another paper on software tool integration, presented at ICSE 6, was runner-up for this honor. Prof. Osterweil was Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and of the Information and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Irvine. He also served as Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prof. Osterweil has been the Program Chair and General Chair of many conferences, most notably ICSE 16 (Program Chair), FSE 6 (General Chair), and ICSE 28 (General Chair). He is President of the International Software Process Association. He has been a member of the Software Engineering Institute’s Process Program Advisory Board for several years during the development of its family of Capability Maturity Models (CMMs).
Prof. Osterweil’s research has centered on software analysis and testing, software tool integration, and software processes and process programming. He has been a Principal Investigator on a number of NSF and ARPA/DARPA projects (e.g. the ARPA-funded Arcadia project). His research and prototype development of testing and analysis systems began over 50 years ago, with the development (in 1973) of the DAVE static dataflow analysis (later relabeled as Model Checking) system. He was a co-developer of the Odin object management system, and a principal in the Toolpack project that developed one of the first software environment–an integrated set of tools–for numerical software development. He introduced the concept of Process Programming in a keynote address to ICSE 9, and then led the development of the Little-JIL process programming language. He and his colleagues have applied the concept of Process Programming by using Little-JIL to demonstrate the feasibility of formally defining processes in such diverse domains as elections, cardiothoracic surgery, scientific data processing, labor-management dispute resolution, and cancer treatment. Formally defined processes in these domains have been systematically and incrementally improved through formal analysis of these formally defined processes.
Education
- PhD, Mathematics, 1971, University of Maryland
- M.A., Mathematics, 1970, University of Maryland
- A.B., Mathematics, 1965, Princeton University
Academic Appointments
- Professor, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, (formerly School of Computer Science, formerly Department of Computer Science), University of Massachusetts Amherst (Sept. 1993–present)
- Dean, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Massachusetts Amherst (Sept. 2001-Sept. 2005)
- Director, Irvine Research Unit in Software, University of California at Irvine (July 1990–1993)
- Chair, Dept. of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine (July 1989-Dec. 1992).
- Professor, Dept. of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine (Sept. 1988-1993)
- Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (June 1982-Sept. 1988)
- Chair, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (June 1981-June 1986)
- Associate Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (June 1977-June 1982)
- Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (Sept. 1971-June 1977)