News Release

SnT researcher Lionel Briand is engineer of the year 2013

IEEE Reliability Society Engineer of the Year Award

Grant and Award Announcement

University of Luxembourg

Lionel Briand, University of Luxembourg

image: On Jan. 25, professor Lionel Briand (left) became the recipient of this year's IEEE Reliability Society Engineer of the Year Award. view more 

Credit: IEEE

On January 25th, Professor Lionel Briand has become the recipient of this year's "IEEE Reliability Society Engineer of the Year Award" at the Annual Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) in Colorado Springs, USA. Briand is FNR PEARL chair and Head of the Software Verification and Validation Laboratory at the University of Luxembourg's Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT). The internationally renowned award honors his outstanding contribution to the advancement of the reliability engineering profession, and especially Briand's achievements in model-based software verification and testing.

"We are immensely proud of Lionel Briand for being this year's recipient of this important award", says Professor Björn Ottersten, Director of SnT: "This award is the most prestigious award in the field of software verification and validation. Beside his scientific achievements, with receiving this honor, Lionel has again proven that SnT attracted one of the world's leading software engineering scientists to Luxembourg."

Our modern-day world and the range of industry sectors - from the automotive industry to medical devices - depend to an increasingly greater extent on the existence of complex software systems. This includes software-controlled manufacturing, vehicles, logistics centres as well as telephone and internet nodes. Such systems need to be highly dependable, that is reliable, robust, safe, and secure. "Software-intensive systems have become so complex that software engineers often have great difficulty ensuring their systems' dependability," says Lionel Briand. "To deliver predictably dependable software-intensive systems within cost and time constraints, we need proven software verification and testing technologies that are highly automated." Briand's achievements in this field are now being honoured with the IEEE Reliability Society award.

In January 2012, Lionel Briand was named Scientific Director of SnT's new Software Verification and Validation Laboratory. The laboratory is supported by a "Program Excellence Award for Research in Luxembourg" (PEARL) grant from the Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR). Until the end of 2011, Briand headed the Certus Software Verification and Validation Centre at the Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway, where he conducted research in close collaboration with industry partners and taught at the University of Oslo. Prior to this, Briand served in the Systems and Computer Engineering Department at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he was Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in software engineering. He was the first Head of Software Quality Engineering at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering and has also worked as a research scientist for the Software Engineering Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (CSC) and University of Maryland, USA.

Briand was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow in 2010 and was the recipient of the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award in 2012.

###

About SnT

Launched in 2009 by the University of Luxembourg, SnT is an internationally recognised leading research institute that together with external partners establishes Luxembourg as a European centre of excellence and innovation for secure, reliable, and trustworthy information and communications technologies (ICT). In order to create a great impact, SnT follows an interdisciplinary research approach, taking not only technical aspects into account but also addressing business, human, and regulatory issues. SnT provides a valuable platform for interaction and collaboration between university researchers and external partners. http://www.uni.lu/snt

About IEEE

IEEE is the world's largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The association and its members inspire a global community through IEEE's highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities. http://www.ieee.org/


Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.