Collaborative Research: CCRI: Planning-C: A Community for Configurability Open Research and Development (ACCORD)

Most software today is configurable, meaning it can be customized for different user purposes. While configurability makes software flexible, it can have an impact on software reliability, correctness, usability, performance, and security across all stages of development. Hence, a large community of researchers are studying ways to explore, sample, predict and reason about configurable systems in multiple sub-disciplines of computer science. This collaborative planning proposal brings together researchers from Iowa State University and the University of Central Florida to lay the groundwork for a collective research collaborative, A Community for Configurability Open Research and Development (ACCORD), that will help to centralize research on configurability and to create shared approaches, tools and solutions. The proposal includes activities to survey the research community, create awareness across different sub-disciplines, and document common goals and needs via interaction through workshops and outreach. In addition, activities will develop a common framework, set of tools, and vocabulary, including exemplar artifacts that embody the nature of ACCORD. The final ACCORD infrastructure will provide software tools, models, and solutions that work across different communities, along with tutorials and meta-data information that is not obtainable by only searching the literature. Benchmarks for different types of configurable systems will highlight functional, security and performance challenges. Concepts on configurability and preliminary ACCORD artifacts will be used in the classroom. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in the prototyping of designs and artifacts and will help to build a survey of existing research in configurability. Workshops will be held for different sub-disciplines. Students from the Iowa State first-year honors undergraduate program and the University of Central Florida K-12 Camp Connect will be involved in activities related to this project. The planning will include outreach to non-CISE disciplines, e.g. researchers in the Bioinformatics community, who can benefit from the eventual development of ACCORD. The project website can be found at: https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/mcohen/accord. It will be retained past the lifetime of this grant. All significant artifacts will be archived with a permanent digital object identifier (DOI). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.