Barry Boehm

Barry W. Boehm, TRW Professor of Software Engineering and Director Emeritus, Center for Software Engineering, University of Southern California.

Barry Boehm received his B.A. degree from Harvard in 1957, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA in 1961 and 1964, all in Mathematics. He also received an honorary Sc.D. in Computer Science from the U. of Massachusetts in 2000.

Between 1989 and 1992, he served within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) as Director of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Office, and as Director of the DDR&E Software and Computer Technology Office. He worked at TRW from 1973 to 1989, culminating as Chief Scientist of the Defense Systems Group, and at the Rand Corporation from 1959 to 1973, culminating as Head of the Information Sciences Department. He was a Programmer-Analyst at General Dynamics between 1955 and 1959. 

His current research interests focus on value-based software engineering, including a method for integrating a software system's process models, product models, property models, and success models called Model-Based (System) Architecting and Software Engineering (MBASE).  His contributions to the field include the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO™), the Spiral Model of the software process, the Theory W (win-win) approach to software management and requirements determination, the foundations for the areas of software risk management and software quality factor analysis, and two advanced software engineering environments: the TRW Software Productivity System and Quantum Leap Environment.  

He has served on the boards of several scientific journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer, IEEE Software, ACM Computing Reviews, Automated Software Engineering, Software Process, and Information and Software Technology. He has served as Chair of the AIAA Technical Committee on Computer Systems, Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Software Engineering, and as a member of the Governing Board of the IEEE Computer Society. He has also served as Chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board's Information Technology Panel, Chair of the NASA Research and Technology Advisory Committee for Guidance, Control, and Information Processing, and Chair of the Board of Visitors for the CMU Software Engineering Institute.

His honors and awards include Guest Lecturer of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1970), the AIAA Information Systems Award (1979), the J.D. Warnier Prize for Excellence in Information Sciences (1984), the ISPA Freiman Award for Parametric Analysis (1988), the NSIA Grace Murray Hopper Award (1989), the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence (1992), the ASQC Lifetime Achievement Award (1994), the ACM Distinguished Research Award in Software Engineering (1997), and the IEEE Harlan D. Mills Award (2000). He is a Fellow of the primary professional societies in computing (ACM), aerospace (AIAA), electronics (IEEE), and systems engineering (INCOSE), and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Biography

Debra Facktor Lepore

Debra Facktor Lepore is a rocket scientist and “serial entrepreneur,” with over 20 years experience in the aerospace industry, nearly all of which involved start-up projects or companies. In her faculty appointment as Industry Professor at Stevens, Ms. Lepore serves at the executive level to advance and grow Systems Engineering education and research via new programs and projects and is Program Director of Stevens’ inaugural Master’s of Engineering in Technical Leadership program.  She works with key industry and government sponsors in the space, aerospace, and defense domains, and facilitates outreach with partner organizations such as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Women in Aerospace (WIA), and the International Space University (ISU).  Ms. Lepore also serves as Director of Strategic Programs for the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) that Stevens leads for the Department of Defense, with 20 collaborating schools and over 200 researchers around the country.

Her most recent venture was as President and an owner of AirLaunch LLC in Kirkland, Washington. AirLaunch won ~$38 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force to develop a small launch vehicle to affordably and responsively deploy small satellites to space from a C-17 cargo airplane.  Ms. Lepore led the company’s external activities, including interaction with customers and senior government leaders, as well as development and execution of the company’s business and strategic plans.  The team set records for the longest (66 feet) and heaviest (72,000 pounds) objects dropped from a C-17 aircraft and for the longest duration vapor pressurization (VaPak) engine test fire (at 191 seconds). AirLaunch received two patents for innovative airdrop techniques – gravity air drop (from inside an airplane) and trapeze lanyard (t/LAD, for belly launch underneath an airplane).  The DARPA/Air Force program, and company operations, concluded in late 2008.

Ms. Lepore’s first commercial venture began in 1997 at Kistler Aerospace Corporation in Kirkland, Washington, developer of the privately-funded K-1 reusable aerospace vehicle.  As Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Planning, she identified, developed, and executed new business opportunities, as well as conducted short-term and long-term strategic planning.  She was a key player in raising over $600 million private capital and setting the stage for emerging space launch companies to provide innovative services to US government customers. She led Kistler’s unsolicited proposal to NASA in April 1999 for International Space Station (ISS) resupply services and negotiated an innovative commercial contract with NASA, valued at up to $135 million, under the Space Launch Initiative (SLI) Program in 2001.  These two activities ultimately begat, nearly 10 years later, what are now NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) and Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) programs.

She began her career as an aerospace engineer working on strategic defense projects at ANSER (Analytic Services, Inc.) in Arlington, Virginia.  After the Cold War ended, she served as Chief of Moscow (Russia) Operations for ANSER’s Center for International Aerospace Cooperation and facilitated joint aerospace projects with the former Soviet Union.  Over the course of her career, Ms. Lepore has conducted business and interacted with government and commercial entities around the world, including the U.S., Russia, Ukraine, Europe, Japan, Canada, India, Australia, and South Korea. Projects included government and commercial space launch systems, alternative launch concepts, propulsion, human spaceflight, and aerospace technology.

Ms. Lepore is President of the Women in Aerospace (WIA) Foundation, Inc., 2009 Chair of the Board of WIA, and former chair of the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) Space Council.  She is one of the “100 Top Women in Seattle Tech”, one of Puget Sound Business Journal’s 2008 Women of Influence and 2006 “40 Under 40” Awardees, and recipient of WIA’s 2007 International Achievement Award.  She is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA); an Academician of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) and former Secretary of the IAA Commission on Space Policy, Law and Economics; and an alumna of the International Space University (ISU) 1989 summer session program.  She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Commercial Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) and chairs COMSTAC’s Space Transportation Operations Working Group (STOWG). 

Ms. Lepore is also President of DFL Space LLC, her namesake company that works with clients to engineer innovative business strategies, using her entrepreneurial, technical, and international skills to balance big picture visions with tactical implementation. 

Debra Facktor Lepore earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (B.S.E.) degree (magna cum laude) in 1988 and a Master of Science in Engineering (M.S.E.) degree in 1989, both in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Biography

Art Pyster

Dr. Art Pyster is a Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology and the Deputy Executive Director of the Systems Engineering Research Center, which is a Department of Defense’s University Affiliated Research Center.  During much of 2007 and 2008, he also served as the Director of the Software Engineering Program at Stevens Institute as well as the Stevens Director for the Applied Systems Thinking Institute.

Before joining Stevens in March 2007, Dr. Pyster served as the Senior Vice President and Director of Systems Engineering and Integration for SAIC. Earlier, Dr. Pyster served as the Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Federal Aviation Administration, where he oversaw information technology investment and policy, created and operated the agency’s information security program, created the agency’s enterprise architecture, operated their process improvement program, and achieved a “green” score on the President’s Management Agenda.

Earlier assignments included being the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering for the Federal Aviation Administration, Chief Technical Officer for the Software Productivity Consortium, Director at Digital Sound Corporation, Manager of Systems Engineering at TRW, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

During his career, Dr. Pyster directed the creation of three Capability Maturity Models, oversaw more than $10 billion in investment, directed the creation of several software and systems engineering methods, delivered commercial telecommunications systems with extremely low defects, and managed training programs for thousands of engineers and managers.

His professional and research activities emphasize systems and software engineering, especially the integration of those two disciplines and their application to enterprise operations. Currently, he is leading two international research projects. The first effort is creating a reference curriculum for graduate software engineering education. Notably, that reference curriculum explicitly integrates systems engineering into the education of software engineers.  The second effort is creating a body of knowledge for systems engineering as well as a reference curriculum for graduate systems engineering education. 

Dr. Pyster has authored many papers and one textbook – Compiler Design and Construction.  He is an INCOSE Fellow, the Director for Academic Matters and former Chairman of the Corporate Advisory Board of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), a member of the INCOSE Board of Directors, and a senior member of the IEEE.

Biography

Stan Rifkin

Dr. Rifkin is the Director of Technical Programs at the Systems Engineering Research Center, a Department of Defense University-Affiliated Research Center operated by Stevens Institute of Technology, where he is Research Professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises. Prior to SERC and Stevens, he was a program manager with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and with Master Systems Inc., an advisory services firm that helped organizations improve the processes they used to manage and develop systems.

Dr. Rifkin was also at the Software Engineering Institute, a DoD-funded research and development center operated by Carnegie Mellon Univ., for three years as a direct report to Watts Humphrey, the father of software process improvement. His work and research interest has centered on implementation, deployment, and getting best practices into actual practice. He has implemented improved practices in many organizations and helped to install institutional entities that can sustain the improvements. He has also started software process improvement network (SPIN) groups thoughout the world to meet and share best practices.

Dr. Rifkin founded Master Systems Inc. at the request of the headquarters of the American Red Cross, where he was the head of systems development. Prior to the Red Cross, Dr. Rifkin had been the chief information officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He had also been a visiting scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in Geneva. He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration (quantitative methods) from California State University,  a master’s degree in computer science at UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and a doctorate in organizational analysis at the George Washington University.

Dr. Rifkin is on the editorial board of the new Journal of Enterprise Transformation, was the guest editor of the second issue, and had a paper published in the first one. He was an associate editor in chief of IEEE Software, where he guided the management and quality topics. He has been on the founding editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering, was a founder of the Foundation for the Empirical Study of Programmers, is a senior member of IEEE (computer, engineering management), and the Association for Computing Machinery, and is a member of the Academy of Management, Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, Systems Dynamics Society, and the International Council on Systems Engineering.

Each year Wall Street & Technology magazine names two CIOs of the Year. Dr. Rifkin was the only consultant to both awardees in 1999. He is acknowledged in Strategic Organizational Diagnosis And Design: Developing Theory for Application, 2nd ed.  Dr. Rifkin was the program chair of the Software Engineering Process Group Conference, 2002, the largest software engineering conference in the world. He was the project manager of the Project Management Institute's Organizational Project Management Maturity Model.

Dr. Rifkin has taught graduate engineering management for many years. He was selected as the 2008-2009 adjunct faculty outstanding teacher for his work in the School of Engineering & Technology, National University.

Doris Schultz

As Director of Operations, Systems Engineering Research Center, Ms. Schultz developed the overall business structure, process and staffing approaches.  She is responsible for all sponsored research activities, budget, financial analysis, procurement, reporting, staff development and team building, customer relations, and government regulation interpretation and application (DFAR, FAR, Circulars).

Ms. Schultz combines her 20 years of experience in Fortune 500 organization experience in business management to create efficient business operations.  As Vice-President, Noranda Leasing Limited, she leveraged intrapreneurial opportunities to develop a service organization from start up to a mature organization, which she led for 10 years.  MS Schultz has a BA in Business from York University and an MBA from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Biography

Dinesh Verma

Dinesh Verma is Dean of the School of Systems and Enterprises and Professor in Systems Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, while concurrently serving as the Executive Director of the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), the first University Affiliated Research Center established by the DoD for Systems Engineering Research.  He also serves as the Scientific Advisor to the Director of the Embedded Systems Institute in Eindhoven, Holland.  Prior to this role, he served as Technical Director at Lockheed Martin Undersea Systems, in Manassas, Virginia, in the area of adapted systems and supportability engineering processes, methods and tools for complex system development and integration.

Before joining Lockheed Martin, Verma worked as a Research Scientist at Virginia Tech and managed the University’s Systems Engineering Design Laboratory.  While at Virginia Tech and afterwards, Verma continues to serve numerous companies in a consulting capacity, to include Eastman Kodak, Lockheed Martin Corporation, L3 Communications, United Defense, Raytheon, IBM Corporation, Sun Microsystems, SAIC, VOLVO Car Corporation (Sweden), NOKIA (Finland), RAMSE (Finland), TU Delft (Holland), Johnson Controls, Ericsson-SAAB Avionics (Sweden), Varian Medical Systems (Finland), and Motorola.  He served as an Invited Lecturer from 1995 through 2000 at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom.  His professional and research activities emphasize systems engineering and design with a focus on conceptual design evaluation, preliminary design and system architecture, design decision-making, life cycle costing, and supportability engineering.  In addition to his publications, Verma has received one patent and has two pending in the areas of life-cycle costing and fuzzy logic techniques for evaluating design concepts.

Dr. Verma has authored over 100 technical papers, book reviews, technical monographs, and co-authored two textbooks: Maintainability: A Key to Effective Serviceability and Maintenance Management (Wiley, 1995), and Economic Decision Analysis (Prentice Hall, 1998).  He is a Fellow of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), a senior member of SOLE, and was elected to Sigma Xi, the honorary research society of America.  He serves an a member of the External Advisory Board on Systems Engineering at SAIC, on the Systems Engineering Advisory Council (SEAC) of the Systems and Software Consortium, and the Advisory Board of the Center for Systems Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology.

Biography