Nancy Leveson, Professor, joined the faculty in 1993, coming from California in search of rain. She received all her degrees, in math, management, and computer science, from UCLA (Ph.D., 1980) and spent her formative years being a professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Professor Leveson started a new area of research, software safety, which is concerned with the problems of building software for real-time systems where failures can result in loss of life or property. One advantage of this topic is that nobody questions its goals, except for a few misanthropes (who don't matter anyway). She and her students have recently produced a formal requirements specification for TCAS II, a real collision-avoidance system required on all commercial aircraft in U.S. airspace. One of the lessons she has learned from this project is never to do anything like it again. The FAA seems pleased with it though and has adopted it as their official specification. She and her students are currently working on doing a safety analysis of the specified behavior of TCAS. She claims that you should not read anything into the fact that she has been taking the train a lot lately. The Safety Research Project is now also working on modeling and analysis of automated highways, automobiles, and various aerospace systems. Subtopics in this research area include modeling and analysis of safety, system and software requirements specification, safe software design, software fault tolerance, and verification and validation of safety. She is also starting to work on Human-Computer Interaction, which she feels she is eminently qualified to do as she is a human. Recently, she has agreed to participate in some projects to evaluate the safety of proposed enhancements to the U.S. Air Traffic Control system, which has caused those who know her to make sure their passports are up to date.
Professor Leveson is recently retired as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association and the Board of Directors of the International Council on Systems Engineering, a member of the National Research Council Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, and a member of the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy. Recently she chaired a National Research Council study evaluating the Space Shuttle software process and is currently a committee member on a NRC study of computers in nuclear power plants. Dr. Leveson is a Fellow of the ACM and was awarded the 1995 AIAA Information Systems Award for contributions in space and aeronautics computer technology and science for "developing the field of software safety and for promoting responsible software and system engineering practices where life and property are at stake."
Dr. Leveson gives a short course on software safety for industry once a year in the summer. This class is not affiliated with the university. For information about this year's class, click here. A list of companies and government agencies that have sent employees to the class can be found here.
Dr. Leveson and some students (both former and present) have started a company to commercialize our ideas. For more information about Safeware Engineering Corporation, click here.
This year, Dr. Leveson's new book on software safety, (Safeware: System Safety and Computers, Addison-Wesley, 1995) was published. Recent research papers are available via the web and a list of easily accessible other research papers is also available.
Two popular papers you might find interesting and fun to read:
Women in computer science papers:
Try finger (finger leveson@cs.washington.edu) for information about which city (or airport) I am currently in and perhaps how to contact me.