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About Me

I am a PhD student at the Department of Computing Science of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. I work with Eleni Stroulia in the Services Science Research group, part of the Software Engineering Research Lab. I am more commonly known as Mike Smit. You might be here because I am the O'Reilly User Group Coordinator for the CSGSA, in which case you should visit the ORUG website.

Contact Information

You can always reach me via email, msmit at cs dot ualberta dot ca. I spend most of my time in the software engineering research lab, CSC-259 (492-2446).

Research Interests

My research interests are diverse, multi-disciplinary, and focused on solving real-world problems. I try to choose just a few things at a time, but I have in the past and may in the future work on: Software Engineering, Software Testing and Quality Assurance, Software Reverse Engineering, Software Rengineering, Aspect-oriented systems, Web Applications, Policy Enforcement, Privacy, Confidentiality, Security, Trust, Privacy-enhancing technologies, Electronic Health Records, Privacy in Electronic Commerce, Privacy in Software Engineering, Privacy and Databases, Distributed Databases, Information Retrieval

Education

Master of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, October 2006. Supervisors: Jacob Slonim, Mike McAllister, Kelly Lyons. "Detecting Privacy Infractions in e-Commerce Software Applications: A Framework and Methodology" (extended abstract, full dissertation).

Bachelor of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, May 2004. Supervisor: Mike McAllister. "Automated Analysis of P3P Privacy Policies" (First-class Honours, Sexton Distinction).

Recent Awards

Research

Current Projects

IBM Tivoli Software Software Configuration and Autonomic Re-configuration using Simulation: My PhD work includes projects in collaboration with IBM Tivoli and IBM CAS IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, as well as Humanities Computing. At its most basic, this project is based on the idea that software is getting more complicated, and administrators no longer have a deep technical understanding of the software they configure. My work builds simulations of software to automate the understanding of how the software behaves in different configurations. Using this knowledge, I can a) help establish service level agreements, b) identify suitable configuration options when software is deployed, and b) autonomically (without human intervention) re-configure an application when the circumstances, the requirements, or the environment changes.

GUI Reverse Engineering: This project examines methods of extracting workflows from existing GUIs and automatically migrating that functionality to web-accessible interaction paradigms, such as web services. The focus thus far has been on automatic usage scenario extraction from GUI-driven applications for which the source code is not available.

Privacy, Confidentiality, and Trust of Electronic Health Records This project investigates the current levels of public trust for the privacy of electronic health records and proposes ways to increase this trust in order to spur the adoption of health records. There have been several papers and sub-projects under this banner, including an extensive literature review for the Canadian Medical Association and a paper accepted to Privacy, Security and Trust 2005. There is also a book chapter in progress.

Books

Refereed Publications

  • Smit, M., Nisbet, A., Stroulia, E., Iszlai, G., and Edgar, A. 2009. Toward a simulation-generated knowledge base of service performance. In Proceedings of the 4th international Workshop on Middleware For Service Oriented Computing (Urbana Champaign, Illinois, November 30, 2009). MWSOC '09.
  • Smit, M., Lyons, K., McAllister, M., and Slonim, J. 2009. Detecting Privacy Infractions in Applications: A Framework and Methodology, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Trust, Security and Privacy for Pervasive Applications, October 12-14, 2009.
  • Capacity Planning for Service-oriented Architectures. CASCON 2008, Toronto, Canada, October 27 - 30, 2008. Co-authors: Michael Smit, Andrew Nisbet, Eleni Stroulia, A. Edgar, G. Iszlai, M. Litoiu.
  • Use Case Redocumentation from GUI Event Traces (pdf). In proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2008). Co-authors: Eleni Stroulia, Ken Wong.
  • Electronic Health Records: Public Opinion and Practi calities (pdf). Proceedings of NAEC 2005, Lake Ga rda, Italy. October, 2005. Co-authors: Jacob Slonim, Mike McAllister.
  • Public Trust and Electronic Health Records. Proceed ings of Privacy, Security, and Trust 2005, St Andrews, NB. October 2005. Co-auth ors: Jacob Slonim, Mike McAllister.

Non-refereed Publications / Presentations / Workshops

  • Smit, M., Nisbet, A., Stroulia, E., Iszlai, G., and Edgar, A. 2009. Poster: Software configuration and autonomic re-configuration using simulation. Middleware 2009. November 30-Dec 4, 2009. Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
  • Smit, M., Nisbet, A., Ganev, V., Stroulia, E., Iszlai, G., and Edgar, A. 2009. Poster/Demo: Capacity Planning through Simulation. CASCON 2009. Nov 2-5, 2009. Toronto, Ontario.
  • Poster: Configuring And Deploying Complex SOA Applications, CSER fall meeting 2008
  • "Service Composition: It takes more than XML-based standards", SSME Workshop, March 2008
  • "Challenges in Deploying Complex Applications", presentation at the CASCON 2008 Workshop on “Engineering Autonomic Software Systems”
  • Presentation: "SOA Governance: Privacy & Security", Fall Meeting, Consortium for Software Engineering Research, October 2007
  • Detecting Privacy Infractions in e-Commerce Software Applications: A Framework and Methodology (pdf). Masters Dissertation, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS. 2006.
  • Increase consumer trust in your WebSphere Commerce site by deploying a P3P policy (html). IBM developerWorks Article, November 2005. Co-authors: Darshanand Khusial and Terry Chu.
  • Public Opinion and Electronic Health Records. Confidential report submitted to the Canadian Medical Association. 2004. Co-authors: David Zitner, Jacob Slonim, Mike McAllister.

Patents

  • Privacy Modeling Framework For Software Applications. Patent application filed March 2006. Jen Hawkins, Darshanand Khusial, Kelly Lyons, Michael McAllister, Jacob Slonim, Michael Smit. (see Masters dissertation)

Past Projects

These projects are either completed or on temporary hiatus.

IBM WebSphere SoftwareDetecting Privacy Infractions in e-Commerce Software Applications: This collaboration with the IBM WebSphere Commerce development team and IBM CAS explored privacy in a leading e-commerce software application. In addition to a series of short-term privacy-related suggestions, this research described the framework and methodology for managing the privacy policy of an enterprise that eventually became my Masters dissertation. The framework included creation (based on factors like privacy legislation and consumer preferences), validation and verification, deployment and enforcement, and compliance testing for business processes and software. To validate the framework, two modules (creation and compliance testing) were implemented and deployed to test IBM software.

Privacy In Electronic Commerce: This project investigates privacy-enhancing technologies for electronic commerce, ways to increase consumer trust, methods to assess the levels of online privacy, and many other more specific areas. Sub-projects include:

  • Automatic Text Classification of Plain-text Privacy Policies
    This project investigates ways to process the natural language in privacy policies in order to classify the policy based on user preferences. One proposed method uses n-gram-based analysis to create a profile of "good" and "bad" privacy policies, and then create a profile for each new policy we encounter. The policy is then assigned a classification based on the distance between its profile and the profile of each category. Other methods are being investigated.
  • Automated Analysis of P3P Privacy Policies - Honours Thesis
    The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is a specification for machine-readable privacy policies. We present a system designed to crawl the web, download and store P3P policies, and analyze them. This system is designed to enable large-scale automated privacy surveys. The results of initial scans are presented, and used as a basis for a discussion of the efficacy of P3P in improving the state of online privacy.

Privacy in Software Engineering: This project manifests itself in a single paper that addresses integrating privacy into the design and testing of software, discusses risks that can be addressed by protecting privacy, and recommends best practices for protecting privacy in the software development process. Although no work has been done since this paper, this remains an area of great interest that will likely be pursued at some point.

Quoogle: Suggesting Additional Keywords for Google Search Queries: Quoogle is an information retrieval project designed to enhance existing Google results with suggested keywords. We came up with this idea before it was a common sight on the Google page itself. Many search engine queries are just one or two words long, which is not a lot to work with. Quoogle downloads the first 100 results returned by a short query and does some standard text analysis to extract additional keywords. It aims to suggest 5 additional keywords very different from each other and provides convenient links to replace your original query with the new augmented query.