Phil Koopman Personal Information

Contacting me

Philip Koopman
Hamershlag Hall A-308
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA

e-mail: {email}
Phone/voice mail: +1 (412) 268-5225
Fax: +1 (412) 268-6353
Assistant: Matt Koeske: +1 (412) 268-7293 (koeske@ece.cmu.edu)
My plan file.

Campus maps & directions courtesy of CS.
Current Pittsburgh weather | City profile for Pittsburgh |Yahoo Pittsburgh page.

Don't forget to practice your Pittsburghese before you visit.

Research Interests

Quantifying Robustness:

Emphasis on time to market and cost is leading to increased use of "off-the-shelf" hardware and software components. However, such general-purpose computing components may not be adequately designed for the stringent reliability, availability and safety requirements of embedded systems. The Ballista project has created a methodology and tool set for quantifying the robustness of software application programming interfaces. Results to date include comparative evaluations of commercial software robustness and helping operating system vendors identify software defects that cause complete system crashes.

Graceful Degradation of Embedded Systems

A promising approach to increasing the robustness of distributed embedded systems is to employ graceful degradation so that overall system operation continues even when hardware or software components fail. The RoSES project combines ideas from product family development and field configuration management to create systems that degrade gracefully, can be repaired with non-exact spares, and are able to be field upgraded with minimal effort.

Embedded Computing:

The vast majority of the billions of processors manufactured yearly are incorporated into products other than general-purpose computers. These embedded systems can have significantly different tradeoffs than general-purpose computer designs. Issues include interdisciplinary optimization, cost sensitivity, real-time performance, reliability, safety and life-cycle support. My distributed embedded systems course teaches core topics from software engineering, distributed real-time embedded networking, and critical system design. Course content is driven by work from the RoSES project, particularly in the areas of dependable embedded networking and advancing the capabilities of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to address the special needs of complex embedded systems.

Experience

Philip Koopman is an Associate Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Additionally, he is the Embedded & Reliable Information System thrust leader at the CMU Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, the Dependable Embedded System thrust leader for the CMU/General Motors collaborative research laboratory, and a faculty member of the Institute for Software Research, International (ISRI).

Koopman received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989 and both a M.Eng. and B.S. in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1982.

From 1982 to 1987, he was a U.S. Navy submarine officer. He completed a Pacific Fleet sea and shipyard tour aboard the USS Haddock (nuclear-powered fast attack submarine) as Sonar and Weapons officer and is qualified in submarine warfare (gold dolphins). He earned the Naval Expeditionary Medal for participation in the Cold War and a Naval Achievement Medal. He was then stationed in Newport, RI at the Trident Command and Control Systems Maintenance Activity (TRICCSMA), which performs system integration and lifecycle support for Trident submarine tactical computer systems.

From 1986 to 1991, he was a partner in WISC Technologies, which designed and manufactured Forth-based stack computers. The patents for the technology were licensed to Harris Semiconductor. He then became a Senior Scientist at Harris Semiconductor, in charge of embedded processor architecture from 1989 to 1991. He was the architect of the Harris RTX-4000 32-bit processor prototype.

From 1991 to 1995, he was a Principal Research Engineer at United Technologies Research Center. There, he worked with embedded computer applications for Otis (elevators), Pratt & Whitney (jet engines), Norden (RADARs and SONARs), Carrier (HVAC equipment), UT Automotive (input control electronics and vehicle security), and Sikorsky (helicopters). He also conducted research on system design methodologies and embedded CAD tools.

In 1996, Koopman joined the CMU EDRC (now called ICES) as a Visiting Senior Research Engineer. In 1997 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2001, and was awarded tenure in July 2002.

Koopman has written four books, and is a named inventor on twenty-five U.S. patents in areas such as embedded CPU design, embedded communications, vehicle security, and location-aware services. Thus far he has advised or co-advised 20 students, including four students who have been awarded Ph.D. degrees. He is a member of IFIP WG 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance, a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Senior Member of the ACM.

So, do you want to know what it's like in industry? [SOUND] (Of course these days, it's really only a matter of degree...)

Publications


(See also my student thesis page | Ballista publications | RoSES publications)

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U.S. Patents

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On-Line Proceedings

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Philip Koopman: {email}