International conference MODELS 2011 comes to Wellington

The prestigious conference MODELS 2011 is on in Wellington next week. This is the first time the conference is being held in the Southern Hemisphere.

MODELS 2011 is at Te Papa from 16-21 October. The conference is sponsored by international organisations the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

“I’m very excited that the conference is being held in New Zealand and in Wellington. Up till now, it has mainly been held in North America and Europe so it’s a real coup to host it here,” says Victoria University Associate Professor and General Chair of the conference, Dr Thomas Kühne.

The MODELS conference series covers all aspects of model-based development for software and systems engineering, including modelling languages, methods, tools, and their applications. Engineering models have long been used in the development of complex systems and the approach is becoming more prevalent in the design of modern software.

The future-focused theme for MODELS 2011 is ‘Modelling in 2020’.

“We’ve chosen this theme to encourage ‘outside the box’ thinking about the future role of modelling in complex systems engineering.” says Lancaster University and Program Chair for the Foundations track of the conference,” Professor Jon Whittle.

The conference has been organised and supported by Victoria University’s School of Engineering and Computer Science.


Keynote speakers

Dr Mark Sagar from Weta Digital, winner of two Academy Awards. He has brought computer generated faces to life for films such as Avatar and King Kong and received the awards for his pioneering work in this area.

Dr Wolfram Schulte, a principal researcher and the founding manager of Microsoft’s Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) team in Redmond, Washington. He co-designed Microsoft’s LINQ and Task Parallel Library, co-built the model-based testing tool Spec Explorer and the unit testing tool Pex, co-developed the program verifiers Spec# and VCC, and is working on a constraint logic programming language called Formula.

Professor Marian Petre is Professor of Computing at the Open University, UK. She holds a Royal Society/Wolfson Research Merit Award in recognition of her research on expertise in software design. She studies how leading professional software developers reason about, represent, and communicate designs.

For more information about the conference, please visit http://modelsconference.org