Joanne Atlee

Biography

Dr. Joanne Atlee is a professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, Canada.

Research Interest

Professor Atlee is interested in all aspects of model-based software engineering, with a particular interest in requirements and design notations that are understandable and readable by practitioners, yet have semantics that are precise enough to be automatically analyzed. Much of her research work has focused on automated tools and techniques for analyzing software requirements and specifications. She works with model checkers and reachability analyzers that exhaustively check that a software model adheres to desired system properties (e.g., safety, liveness, and timing properties, expressed as logic formulae). These tools hold the promise of providing software practitioners with push-button verification of their specifications and designs. However, such verification is computationally expensive in both space and time; thus, much of her work involves understanding how to structure and abstract specifications, so that their model checking is feasible.