At the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), we actively seek collaboration on research into key technical challenges facing developers and managers of current and future software-reliant systems.

Our mission is to deliver results that are demonstrated to solve U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) needs, shown to improve software-reliant system capabilities or to cut the time needed to deploy them, and adopted by practitioners who then achieve measurable improvements in their practices.

Grounded and measurable

We continually form and reform our understanding of critical challenges based on our own experience, information gleaned from national studies, and discussion with our many collaborators in the DoD, other government agencies, industry, and academia
 
We measure our research against such indicators of quality as

• the Heilmeier catechism, outside reviews, and go/no-go decision gates
• where we publish, where we're invited to give keynote addresses, and who asks to collaborate with us
• a continual infusion of new ideas gained through collaboration with other researchers and interaction with DoD, other government, industry, and academic organizations

Current focus areas

Based on our understanding of critical challenges, we are conducting research in the following areas:

Securing the cyber infrastructure

• Malware & forensics analysis for mobile platforms
• Moving target defenses
• Secure C language compiler
• Semantic malware analysis
• Threat metrics

Advancing disciplined methods for engineering software

• Data driven software assurance
• Early life cycle cost estimation
• Scalable static analysis of real-time concurrent software
• Scheduling theory for multicore
• Standards in cloud computing interoperability
• System of systems architecture patterns
• TSP-Secure (Team Software Process)

Accelerating assured software delivery and sustainment for the mission

• Agile acquisition
• Architecture-focused testing
• Situational process engineering

• Strategically managing technical debt

Innovating software for competitive advantage

• Context-aware network analysis in resource-constrained environments
• Software producibility for future architectures

Learn more about us

Read capsule summaries of a few of our research collaborations.