Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

ECpE Professor's Research Attracts Attention From Microsoft

By: Dana Schmidt

Contacts:
Dana Schmidt, communications specialist, ECpE, 515-294-3071
Suraj Kothari, professor, ECpE, 515-294-7212

Ames, Iowa – The work of Suraj Kothari, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University, and his colleagues is capturing worldwide attention. Most recently, the professor's research has piqued the interest of Microsoft, the world's largest software company.

Kothari and his colleagues have developed Knowledge-Centric Software (KCS) tools that allow experts to quickly and efficiently analyze and transform software. The KCS tools have applications in the automotive, avionic, and software industries.

"We've developed tools that perform complex analysis and transformation tasks in seconds rather than hours," Kothari says. "These tools can eliminate human errors that often occur in tedious manual processing tasks."

Kothari's new KCS tools help migrate software systems, detect errors in software, and analyze software design used to run various features in cars and airplanes, among other tasks. For instance, KCS tools can simulate runtime behavior of software in an airplane’s flight control system to check if conditions exist that would cause the control system to crash while the plane is in-flight. The KCS tools detect errors faster and more thoroughly than methods currently used to check these systems.

In 2002, Kothari and his team commercialized their research and founded EnSoft, a software engineering company located in the ISU Research Park in Ames, Iowa. The company has attracted some of Iowa State’s top-notch engineering graduates.

Microsoft is another in a long list of major companies—including Toyota, DaimlerChyrsler, Ford, General Motors, BMW, Volvo, Jaguar, Honeywell, Rockwell Collins, Motorola, General Electric, and Caterpillar—showing an interest in the applications of Kothari's tools.  

Kothari says the automotive industry needs the tools because cars now are more complex than ever, especially due to the software used in key features such as in anti-lock brake systems and in the complex control systems for hybrid vehicles. He says so much software is used in cars and avionics now, it's becoming almost unmanageable.

Microsoft and other similar companies could use the KCS tools to analyze computer operating systems. The tools can evaluate a system’s design and security, as well as compare it to other operating systems.

"The whole idea behind the tools is to improve the productivity and reliability of software," Kothari says.

Anandeep Pannu, a program manager at Microsoft, first learned about Kothari's research during a tutorial Kothari gave at the 17th annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering held last November in North Carolina. Pannu was intrigued by the technology (read his comments on his blog at http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/11/16/learning-to-read.aspx). He  later contacted Kothari and invited him to visit Microsoft. Kothari traveled to Seattle, Washington, at the beginning of February to meet with Microsoft officials.

Kothari’s recent success comes nearly 13 years after he initially began research in this area. His research efforts commenced in 1994 when he worked alongside professors in physics, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering to take sequential scientific computing and transform it into parallel software for supercomputers with thousands of processors.

Kothari's research has been funded by various federal agencies, including a $96,000 grant from the Grow Iowa Values Fund.

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