DEFENSE

Systems and software engineering event draws technology creators from entire nation: Dr. William Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering; and John Stenbit, Department of Defense CIO and Assistant Secretary for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, will keynote the October 24-25 inaugural convocation of the University of Southern California Center for Systems and Software Engineering. USC President Steven B. Sample, Provost C.L. Max Nikias and Dean Yannis Yortsos of the Viterbi School of Engineering, will also participate, along with elite corporate, government and academic software and systems creators. A schedule of the event is posted at: its Web site. The Executive Workshop that takes place the day after the convocation, on October 25, continues and extends the series of Executive Workshops that the CSE has been holding since 1993. The current CSE affiliates' program has 30 member organizations, including all of the major aerospace companies; leading companies in telecommunications, computing, and software development; and most of the leading systems and software engineering nonprofit organizations. In addition to research information exchange, the event will also mark the union of USC's Center for Software Engineering (CSE) and the research arm of USC's Systems Architecting and Engineering (SAE) Program, with the additional involvement of leading USC systems-oriented researchers in the Viterbi School of Engineering, Marshall School of Business Administration, Information Sciences Institute, and Institute for Creative Technologies. A primary objective of the CSSE is to bring its researchers together with counterpart industry and government leaders to assess and anticipate future needs for improved systems and software engineering capabilities, and to perform collaborative interdisciplinary research to address the needs. USC Principals include 5 INCOSE Fellows, 10 IEEE Fellows, and 8 members of the National Academy of Engineering. "We have searches underway to recruit additional senior research leaders and promising junior researchers in systems and software engineering over the next couple of years," says CSSE co-director Barry Boehm, TRW professor in the Viterbi School department of computer science and an NAE member "Those interested in our current direction should look at a recent paper, derived from the results of several of these workshops," says co-director Stan Settles, IBM professor in the Viterbi School's Daniel?Epstein department of Industrial & Systems Engineering. "It provides an example assessment of future systems and software engineering needs and challenges, and example USC process research results being applied on early forerunners of future systems of systems and product lines."