Mission Statement
Nichols Hall, Kansas State University
Home of the SAnToS Laboratory and
the Computing and Information Sciences Department.
The Laboratory for Specification, Analysis, and Transformation of Software (SanToS) aims to develop and mature technologies and tools for effective construction of high-confidence software systems. The work in the lab emphasizes
- the use of rigorous analysis techniques with solid mathematical underpinnings,
- a variety of forms of software specifications to capture crucial system correctness properties, and
- the use of software models as a key mechanism for capturing essential software structure and behavior while hiding low-level implementation details and complexities that may overwhelm the process of reasoning about a system.
Visitor Information
- Nichols Hall - Map of KSU Campus
- Driving Direction to Manhattan from the East
- Driving Direction to Manhattan from the West
- Driving Direction to Manhattan from the North
- Driving Direction to Manhattan from the South
- Directory for Faculty Room Numbers
- Hotel Information
Tool and Technology Themes
SanToS researchers have built a number of analysis/development tools including software modeling, analysis, and verification tools for Java, domain-specific model checking/analysis environments, and sophisticated tool environments to support product-line development of component-based systems. The Java tools developed by the lab aid software engineers by identifying software faults (particularly those associated with multi-threaded programs) that are hard to detect by traditional quality assurance methods, by crawling over large code bases to find code idioms/patterns that often associated with bugs, and by providing sophisticated calculation and visualizations of program dependence information. For construction of large-scale component-based systems, SAnToS by provides integrated development environments that can be used to support software product lines development processes in which software components and development infrastructure (including analyses, visualizations, code generators, ect) are reused across families of similar software products. These tools/environments have the potential to increase the reliablitly of software while reducing time and monetary costs required to develop software systems.
Research Methodology and Industrial Collaboration
SanToS Laboratory emphasizes a research methodology in which research advances are achieved by building robust tools that can be applied to and evaluated against real systems in the context of realistic development practices, and by using insights gained in these evaluations to guide future research directions and priorities. In these efforts, we rely on extensive interactions with our industrial partners to gain insight into particular foundational advances and tool capabilites that will be necessary to affect practice. SanToS tools have been used in projects by engineers at Boeing (Phantom Works. St. Louis), Lockheed Martin, and Rockwell-Collins.
Group Leadership within the International Research Community
SanTos researchers have established a strong internations reputation in the areas of programming languages, computer-aided verification, and software engineering, and group members frequently serve on or chair program committees for top academic conferences in these areas.
Funding
Since 1997, SAnToS Laboratory has received over $8.5 million in funding through agencies and companies such as the National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, DARPA, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell Collins, IBM, and Intel. Our funding levels have allowed us to hire several full-time software developers who have extensive experience in building systems software and large-scale tools. This means that, compared to most other academic groups, we concentrate much more extensively on producing robust tools that can be used by our collaborators in industry and distributed for wide-spread academic experimentation.