Research Themes at CSR
The Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) at the City University London is an independent Research Centre in the School of Informatics, founded in 1983. Over the years, CSR has attracted over £8 million of international and UK research funding, and has built an international reputation for research achievements in several areas as discussed below. This research has been motivated by the dependence of the modern society on socio-technical systems for a number of critical tasks in which failure can have very high costs. As a consequence, high levels of dependability (reliability, safety, security etc.) are required from such systems.
Dependability assessment and assurance of socio-technical systems: As part of the DIRC, INDEED and ReSIST projects (undertaken in collaboration with several other UK and European universities) and in a project funded by Cancer Research UK, CSR has been researching the dependability of systems, going beyond investigating just the technical concerns and addressing socio-technical issues too. This work is multi-disciplinary in nature and brings together expertise from several areas including psychology, sociology, ethnography, economics, statistics as well as computer science. Important work to highlight here is the award-winning Mammography studies led by CSR, as well as studies on e-Voting systems.
Diversity as a means for achieving and assessing dependability and fault-tolerance: CSR has over 20 years of experience from research concerning the use of diversity in computer systems. This work has been carried out as part of several projects ( PDCS, DeVa, DISCS, DISPO, DIRC, DOTS and INDEED) and has produced important contributions on the means for both achieving and assessing the dependability benefits that may be achieved from employing diversity.
Quantitative assessment of the means for achiving dependability: In addition to the research on achieving and assessing dependability, CSR has, in collaboration with other researchers in the US and the UK, also contributed important results on the benefits of using diverse testing methods to improve system dependability. Details can be found in the paper "Choosing a Testing Method to Deliver Reliability" and in the paper "Modelling the Effects of Combining Diverse Software Fault Detection Techniques".
Resilience of information-based critical infrastructures: Over the last few years CSR has also participated in a large EU-funded project (IRRIIS) on modelling the resilience of information-based critical infrastructures, such as power and telecommunications networks. Additonally CSR (in collaboration with Adelard and Cranfield University) has performed a study to assess the technical and commercial feasibility of tools and services for analysing interdependencies between critical infrastructures.
Quantitative assessment of security of socio-technical systems: Funded from a grant by the Strategic Development Fund of City University London, CSR has built an experimental infrastructure for research on computer security. CSR has also established lasting contacts with the High Tech Crime Unit of the City of London Police, and has joined international experimental networks for data collection and analysis of security breaches. It now offers tutorials and short courses for industry in Digital Forensics and Incident Response.