Research interests

Beyond my passion for discovering new ways to teach computer science, my primary areas of research interest are programming languages and software engineering. Specifically, I am interested in improving software development and maintenance by aiding in the identification of reusable components and the development of tools to assist in reverse engineering and program comprehension. I have found the application of insights and techniques of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic to be particularly useful in studying these problems.

Publications

Rice, M. and Siff, M. Clusters, concepts, and pseudometrics. To appear in Proceedings First Irish Conference on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science and Information Technology, 2001 (Elsevier - Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science). [PDF]

Siff, M. and Reps, T., Identifying modules via concept analysis. In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 25, 6 (Nov./Dec. 1999), pp. 749-768. [abstract; click here to request a copy of the paper.]

Siff, M., Chandra, S., Ball, T., Kunchithapadam, K., and Reps, T., Coping with type casts in C. In Proceedings of ESEC/FSE '99: Seventh European Software Engineering Conference and Seventh ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, (Toulouse, France, Sept. 6-10, 1999), pp. 180-198. [abstract; PostScript; PDF]

Siff, M., Chandra, S., Ball, T., Kunchithapadam, K., and Reps, T., Coping with type casts in C. Bell Labs. Tech. Rep. BL0113590-990202-03, Lucent Technologies, Inc., Naperville, IL, Feb. 1999. [abstract; PostScript; PDF]

Siff, M., Techniques for software renovation. Ph.D. dissertation and Tech. Rep. TR-1384, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, August 1998. [abstract; dissertation]

Siff, M. and Reps, T., Identifying modules via concept analysis. In ICSM '97: IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, (Oct. 1-3, 1997, Bari, Italy), M.J. Harrold and G. Visaggio (eds.), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 1997, pp. 170-179. [abstract; PostScript; PDF]

Siff, M. and Reps, T., Program generalization for software reuse: From C to C++. In SIGSOFT 96: Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, (San Francisco, CA, October 16-18, 1996), ACM, New York, NY, 1996, pp. 135-146. [abstract; paper]