John Knight
Professor of Computer Science
Office: Rice Hall, Room 422
Phone: (434) 982-2216
Fax: (434) 982-2214
Email:
knight@cs.virginia.edu
Home Page:
John Knight
Department of Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Virginia
85 Engineer's Way,
P.O. Box 400740
Charlottesville,
Virginia 22904-4740
Be VERY careful which airplanes you fly in.
Areas Of Interest
Software reliability and software engineering
Biographical Sketch
John Knight received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1973. After two years at West Virginia University and seven years at NASA's Langley Research Center, he joined the UVa in 1981 as an Associate Professor of Computer Science. He spent 1987-89 at the Software Productivity Consortium, and was promoted to Professor in 1992. He served as General Chair of the International Conference on Software Engineering, and as Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering from January 2002 to December 2005. He is a member of the editorial board of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal. He has directed six Ph.D. theses with three more in progress. He is the author or co-author of over 60 papers.
Research
Knight's research focuses on issues related to software and architectures in high-value systems - computing systems of extreme importance to society whose failure would have a severe negative impact whether measured in terms of time, money or loss of life. Dependability of a computing system is the ability to deliver reliable, available, safe services that can justifiably be trusted. Such systems include medical devices, avionics, weapons systems; critical infrastructures such as financial networks, transportation systems, and power systems; and grid computing systems that increasingly play a strategically vital role in such diverse industries as finance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and aerospace. Specific topics investigated by John Knight include security through diversity, secretless security frameworks, formal and Natural Languages in Software Systems, survivability architectures, anti-terrorism and disaster management, safety Analysis, and software forensics. He works closely with industrial and governmental partners to ensure research relevance.
Selected Publications
- The ACCESS Safety Case Toolset (Abstract), John Knight and Panayiotis Steele, Submitted to International System Safety Conference, Las Vegas, NV (August 2011).
- A New Approach to Creating Clear Safety Arguments, Richard Hawkins, Tim Kelly, John Knight, and Patrick Graydon, Safety-critical Systems Symposium, Southampton, UK (February 2011).
- Certification and Safety Cases, Patrick Graydon, John Knight, and Mitchell Green, International System Safety Conference, Minneapolis, MN (September 2010).
- Practical Limits on Software Dependability: A Case Study, Patrick J. Graydon, John C. Knight, and Xiang Yin, 15th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies – Ada-Europe 2010 (June 2010).
- On the Effectiveness of the Metamorphic Shield: The effects of continuously changing the attack surface, Anh Nguyen-Tuong, Andrew Wang, Jason D. Hiser, John Knight and Jack Davidson, Workshop on Survivability in Cyberspace, CPSWEEK 2010, Stockholm, Sweden (April 2010).