James R. Cordy

P.Eng., Professor and Director, School of Computing, Queen's University
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~cordy/

Keynote: Dreaming in a Straight Jacket: on professions, engineering and creativity

What's all this profession nonsense about? What is a profession anyway? Isn't it something like a craft?

And what's up with all these processes, rules and procedures? Doesn't it all just get in the way of creativitiy? I feel like I'm in a straight jacket - I need to move fast. Won't that make my users happy? Isn't that what they want?

And anyway, so what's engineering got to do with software? What is this engineering stuff, and why should a programmer be a software engineer? What difference does it make anyway, and why does it matter?

Let's explore these and other interesting questions about software engineering and its relation to House, Facebook, Second life, Windows, eXtreme programming, A320's, brain surgery and the Sydney Opera House.

Biography

Jim Cordy is Director of the School of Computing and Professor of Computing and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In 1985 Dr. Cordy co-founded Holt Software Associates (HSA), a Toronto-based company specializing in educational software systems, and from 1995 to 2000 he was vice president and chief research scientist at Legasys Corporation, a software technology company specializing in legacy software system analysis and renovation.

Dr. Cordy is a founding member of the Software Technology Laboratory at Queen's University. From 1991 to 1997 he led the Software Design Technology project, a multi-university research project in software architecture research funded by the Information Technology Research Centre (ITRC, now CITO, an Ontario government Centre of Excellence). As project leader Dr. Cordy was winner of the 1994 ITRC Bank of Montreal Innovation Excellence Award and the 1995 ITRC Chair's Award for Entrepreneurship in Technology Innovation.

Prof. Cordy is the author or co-author of numerous contributions in computer software systems, including the PL/I subset compiler SP/k (1977), the Toronto Euclid compiler (1980), the S/SL compiler technology (1980), the Concurrent Euclid programming language (1981), the Turing programming language (1983), Turing Plus (1985), Object-Oriented Turing (1992), the orthogonal code generation compiler technology (1986), the TXL programming language (1991), the TXL source transformation system (1995), the LS/2000 year 2000 conversion system (1996), and the LS/AMT software analysis and migration system (1999). He has published more than 75 refereed academic and technical papers in software engineering, programming languages, user interfaces and compiler technology, including the books "Introduction to Compiler Construction Using S/SL" (Queen's, 1986) and "The Turing Programming Language: Design and Definition" (Prentice-Hall, 1988).

Dr. Cordy received his BSc in computer science and mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1973 and his MSc in computer science in 1976. After serving several years as chief programmer and senior research associate at the Computer Systems Research Institute of the University of Toronto, he returned to school and received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1986.

Dr. Cordy is a past member and chair of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) grant selection committee in Computing and Information Science and an elected member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.4, "software implementation technology." He is a registered professional engineer, a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and an IBM Center for Advanced Stuides Faculty Fellow.

He is the program co-chair of the IEEE 2005 International Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC 2005), program co-chair of the 2005 Centre for Advanced Studies Conference (CASCON 2005), industrial co-chair of the IEEE 2005 International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2005) and co-organizer of the Dagstuhl International Seminar on Transformation Techniques in Software Engineering (2005). He served as industrial chair of the IEEE 2004 International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2004), as industrial co-chair of ICSM 2002, as program co-chair of the IEEE 2nd International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2002) and program chair of the IEEE 4th International Conference on Computer Languages (ICCL'92). He serves on the program committees of numerous conferences and workshops in software systems and languages, on the editorial board of several journals, books and special issues, and as session chair at many conferences.

In 1990-91 Dr. Cordy was invited to be guest researcher at GMD (now part of the Fraunhofer Institute), the German National Institute for Computer Science, in Karlsruhe, Germany, and 2004-05 he was again invited as guest researcher, at the Automated Reasoning Systems Division of ITC-IRST in Trento, Italy.