RoSI – Role-based Software Infrastructures for continuous-context-sensitive Systems

The research training group ended on 30 September 2022. It was funded by DFG 01.10.2013 – 31.03.2018 (1st funding phase) and 01.04.2018 -30.09.2022 (2nd funding phase). 

News

  • Paper Presentation: RoSI Alumni Lars Schütze presented at this year’s International Workshop on Context-Oriented Programming and Advanced Modularity (COP), one of the workshops centered around modularity and context-oriented software. At COP, Lars presented Guard the Cache: Dispatch Optimization in a Contextual Role-oriented Language, a work extending prior publications to more dynamic domains; a result of a bachelor’s thesis by Cornelius Kummer. Also presented had been another work co-authors by Lars titled Modeling Flexible Monitoring Systems with a Role-Based Control Loop. The work is a collaboration with members of our the DFG-funded RoSI graduate school. For more info, please see: https://cfaed.tu-dresden.de/ccc-news/news_reader/cc-chair-at-cop-colocated-with-ecoop-2022
  • Article in Research Features Magazine: An article sketching the general research goal of RoSI has been published in Research Features Magazine – 138 – Research Features (p. 6 – 9): Thus, our research topic is being conveyed to a broad audience who are interested in popular scientific topics.
  • Workshop: 1-day-class on Good Scientific Practice and Research Data Management on Tuesday, 4. February 2020
  • Best Paper Award and Förderpreis: RoSI-PhD Christiane Kuhn is again being awarded for her paper „On Privacy Notions in Anonymous Communication“. Earlier, she received the Best Paper Award of the highly renowned privacy conference PETS 2019 for this publication. Now, the academic advisory council of the German Association for Data Protection and Data Security (GDD) decided to honor her work with a Förderpreis (advancement award).
    The paper aims at enabling a comparison between the privacy goals of different anonymization networks like TOR or ANON. Up to now, comparable work has only been done in classical cryptography. But, for private communication, a common approach for definition and measurement of the goals and security levels has still been missing. This paper has established foundations for this and reveals inconsistencies of former definitions and analyses.
    The GDD, the biggest German data protection association, bestows their Förderpreis award for outstanding scientific work of junior researchers in the area of data protection and security yearly since 2006.
  • Shortlisted for Best Paper: The paper „Mixing Description Logics in Privacy-Preserving Ontology Publishing” by Prof. Franz Baader and Adrian Nuradiansyah received the „Shortlisted for Best Paper Award“ at the 42nd German Conference on Artifical Intelligence (KI 2019)
    In total, there were 77 submissions of which 29 were accepted, and 3 were shortlisted.
    Given an ontology represented in a lightweight knowledge representation language and a privacy policy, the paper investigates a mechanism to check whether publishing this ontology is safe for the policy, in the sense that the combination of the ontology with other external policy-compliant ontologies expressed in different/more expressive languages is still compliant with the policy.​
    KI 2019 was held from September 23 to 26 in Kassel during the 50th anniversary of Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI). KI is organized annually in cooperation with Fachbereich Künstliche Intelligenz (Department of AI) of GI.
  • Film Clip: Equal opportunities policy is a core task and a major challenge for every university. In order to master future tasks and to secure the prospective performance, it is important – so the words of the German Council of Science and Humanities – to “comprehensively realize the entire society’s full potential and to enable all groups of persons represented. In the last years, TU Dresden has stepped up measures to get closer to the goal of a gender equal and family-friendly university. In 2018, the gender equality concept of the TU Dresden was updated. This has resulted in an increasing number of female students in Computer Science of TU Dresden (17.7 % in winter term 17/18). But the percentage of female computer scientists who are aiming higher scientific qualification (PhD, habilitation) is still quite low.The DFG-financed research training group “Role-based Software Infrastructures (RoSI)” strives to support gender equality measures of TU Dresden by further activities. Exemplarily, in this film-clip three female computer scientists talk about their personal motivation for a scientific career at TU Dresden: Christiane Kuhn is a PhD in the research training group „RoSI“, Anke Lehmann is PostDoc at the Faculty of Computer Science, and Susanne Strahringer is professor of business informatics and Principle Investigator in RoSI.
  • Award: Ismail Ilkan Ceylan has been awarded the E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize 2018 for his dissertation titled “Query Answering in Data and Knowledge Bases”. The award ceremony took place at University of Sofia, during the 30th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2018).Since 2002, The Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) each year awards the E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize, named in honor of the Dutch mathematician Evert Willem Beth, to outstanding dissertations in the fields of Logic, Language, and Information. This year, the chair of the selection committee was Ian Pratt-Hartmann from University of Manchester. The award includes a donation of 2500 euros and an invitation to submit the thesis to the “FoLLI Publications on Logic, Language and Information” issued by Springer.As a member of the DFG-funded research training group “Role-based Software Infrastructures (RoSI)”, Ismail Ilkan Ceylan worked on his dissertation at the chair of automata theory and was supervised by Franz Baader. Ismail Ilkan Ceylan defended his PhD thesis at TU Dresden in November 2017. He then joined University of Oxford as a researcher, where he currently acts as a co-investigator in the EPSRC project “RealPDBs: Realistic Data Models and Query Compilation for Large-Scale Probabilistic Databases“ which runs from 2017 to 2021.
  • Award: RoSI-PhD Adrian Nuradiansyah was awarded the Best Student Paper Award at the 7th Joint International Semantic Technology Conference (JIST 2017). The paper titled „The Identity Problem in Description Logic Ontologies and Its Application to View-Based Information Hiding“ is co-authored by Franz Baader and Daniel Borchmann. JIST 2017 was held from 10 – 12 November 2017 on Gold Coast, Australia.
  • Girls‘ Day 2017: Informatik@Girls: Logisch passt das!.

About us

Software with long life cycles is facing continuously changing contexts. New functionality has to be added, new platforms have to be addressed, and existing business rules have to be adjusted. The concept of role modeling has been introduced in different fields and at different times in order to model context-related information, including – above all – the dynamic change of contexts. However, often roles have only been used in an isolated way for context modeling in programming languages, in database modeling or to specify access control mechanisms. Never have they been used consistently on all levels of abstraction in the software development process, i.e. modeling of concepts, languages, applications, and software systems.

The central research goal of this program is to deliver proof of the capability of consistent role modeling and its practical applicability. This includes the concept modeling (in meta-languages), the language modeling, and the modeling on the application and software system level. The subsequent scientific elaboration of the role concept, in order to be able to model the change of context on different levels of abstraction, represents another research task in this program. Consistency offers significant advantages in the field of software systems engineering because context changes are interrelated on different levels of abstraction; plus, they can be synchronously developed and maintained. Potential application fields are the future smart grid, natural energy based computing, cyber-physical systems in home, traffic, and factories, enterprise resource planning software, context-sensitive search engines, etc.

The research training group puts a strong emphasis on a comprehensive and individual mentoring and qualification approach. In order to achieve this balancing act, quality assurance measures are introduced in the form of advisor tandems and a thesis advisory board on the one hand. On the other hand, motivating and extra-curricular aspects will be integrated into the research training group, such as seminars on soft skills and a comprehensive international program for visiting scientists.

Currently, the research training group GRK 1907 is being financed by DFG in its second phase (01.04.2018 until 30.09.2022). During the first phase of the research training group (01.10.2013 – 31.03.2018), 18 DFG-financed doctoral students plus a group of non-DFG-financed PhDs were members of the group. 10 Principle Investigators of TU Dresden and approximately 90 researchers from Germany and abroad have already contributed to the success of the Research Training Group by holding guest lectures, workshops and submitting joint publications.

The research training group complies with Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice, Avoiding Scientific Misconduct and Dealing with Violations. For more information, please see: Good Scientific Practice at TU Dresden