Professor Jeff Kramer

Emeritus Professor of Distributed Computing
FREng, FCGI, FACM, FIET, FBCS, MAE

Distributed Software Engineering Research Section
Department of Computing, Huxley Building
Imperial College London.
180 Queen’s Gate, London SW7 2AZ, UK.

Email: j.kramer AT SPAMFREE imperial DOT ac DOT uk

Directions to the Department
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Visiting Professor at National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan.

Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

Fellowships & Awards

  • Member of Academia Europaea (MAE) in 2015.

  • Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2008.

  • Fellow of The City and Guilds of London Institute (FCGI) in 2007.

  • Fellow of the ACM, (FACM) 2001 Association for Computing Machinery, New York.

  • Fellow of The Institution of Engineering and Technology, (FIET) in 1992.

  • Chartered Fellow of The British Computer Society, (FBCS) in 2005.

  • ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (award) in 2005 for significant and lasting research contributions to software engineering (joint with Jeff Magee).

  • ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award (award) in 2011 in recognition of his significant and extensive service to the Software Engineering community.

  • Most Influential Paper Award (retrospective award) at International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2003) for the paper from the ICSE meeting of 10 years previously judged to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of software engineering during the 10 years since its original publication. The award-winning paper is entitled “Expressing the Relationships Between Multiple Views in Requirements Specifications”, and was co-authored by B. Nuseibeh and A. Finkelstein and published in the IEEE Proceedings of ICSE-93 held in Baltimore, USA, in May 1993.

  • ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award (retrospective award) in 2012 for a highly influential paper presented at a SIGSOFT conference at least 10 years prior. The award-winning is the 1996 paper entitled “Dynamic Structure in Software Architectures”, Proc. of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), in San Francisco in 1996, co-authored with J. Magee.

  • Most Influential Paper Award (retrospective award) at 16th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing  (SEAMS 2021) for the paper from the SEAMS meeting of  2008 judged to have had the most influence during the 10 years since its original publication. The award-winning paper is entitled “From goals to components: a combined approach to self-management”, and was co-authored by D. Sykes, W. Heaven and J. Magee and published in the IEEE/ACM Proceedings of ICSE-08 held in Leipzig, Germany, in May 2008.

  • Best Paper awards:

    • Kramer, J., and Cunningham, R.J., “Towards a Notation for the Functional Design of Distributed Processing Systems”, (IEEE Int. Conf. on Parallel Processing, 1978), 69-76. Award for the Most Original Paper.

    • Russo, A. Miller, R., Nuseibeh, B. and Kramer, J., “An abductive approach for analysing event-based requirements specifications”, (International Conference on Logic Programming Copenhagen, Denmark, July 29th – August 1st, 2002). Best Applications Paper Award.

    • Nahabedian L, Braberman V, D’Ippolito N, Honied S, Kramer J, Tei K, and Uchitel S., “Assured and Correct Dynamic Update of Controllers”, 11th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2016), Austin, Texas. May 16-17,2016, 96-107). Conference Best Paper.

Conference Involvement (2010 …)

  • ICSE General Co-Chair for ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-2010), Cape Town, May, 2010.

  • Programme Co-Chair for IEEE Israeli Software Engineering Conference (SwSTE’10), Herzlia, June 2010.

  • ICSE Invited Keynote at 34th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012), Zurich, June 2012.

  • APSEC Invited Keynote at 19th ACM/IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Software Engineering (APSEC 2012), Hong Kong, December 2012.

  • SEAMS Invited Keynote at 10th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and  Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2015), Florence, May 2015.
    • **** Keynote slides – Adventures in Adaptation: a software engineering playground (Download: 34.4Mb).
  • ICSE Member of the Program Board of 39th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2017.

  • AWASE Invited Keynote at Asian Workshop on Advanced Software Engineering (AWASE 2017), Chongqing, China, May 2017. 

  • SEFM Invited Keynote at 15th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM’17), Trento, September 2017.

Publications Editor

  • Editor in Chief of Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE) (2006 – 2009 )

  • Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) (1995-2001)

Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Distributed Computing

One of the ways in which traditional engineers cope with the design of large and complex systems is to build models, simplified representations of aspects of the real world. These models are used to check particular properties of the system and its environment. Software engineers have also adopted this approach, but tend to disagree about the role of modelling, the form of the models, and the means of relating different models to the software system. For many distributed systems, software architecture can provide a unifying framework for these concerns.

Software architecture is the overall structure of a system in terms of its constituent components and their interconnections. It can be used to provide the “skeleton” upon which to flesh out the particular details of concern. For analysis, we can associate behavioural descriptions with the components and reason about the behaviour of systems composed from these components according to the architecture. For system construction, we can associate implementations with the components of the architecture. Systems developed in this way have an explicit structural skeleton which, being shared, helps to maintain consistency between the system and the various elaborated models.

16th December 1997, Department of Computing, Imperial College.

Vote of Thanks: Prof. Carlo Ghezzi, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano.

Memorabilia

DSE Section (with thanks to Keng Ng).

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