Sedna

The Sedna Research Lab is part of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ottawa. The lab specializes in research on the Internet of Things (IoT) with a particular emphasis on systems and software engineering.

IoT is revolutionizing industrial automation and is increasingly ubiquitous  in domains such as healtchare, smart cities, telecommunications, precision agriculture, and autonomous vehicles. The control, sensing and networking elements of IoT systems are overwhelmingly software-defined and thus vulnerable to all the same issues as more traditional software-intensive systems, but at a much larger scale. There is a critical need for systems and software engineering methods that support holistic analyses of IoT systems and thereby enable reasoning about system-level properties such as safety, reliability, robustness, security and scalability. 

Sedna's mandate is to bring systems and software engineering to the forefront in the development of complex IoT systems. The lab conducts high-impact research, combining proven systems and software engineering best practices with applied artificial intelligence to provide effective and scalable automation. The lab has internationally recognized expertise in several areas, including verification and testing, requirements engineering, applied machine learning, evolutionary computing, model-driven development, and natural language processing. 

We investigate a variety of multi-disciplinary problems lying at the intersection of software systems, networks and artificial intelligence, and develop novel algorithmic and theoretically principled methods for these problems. Our ultimate objective is to support the construction of the next generation of IoT systems that can sense, reason, react and scale to complex real-world environments with high levels of dependability  and autonomy.  

Sedna's research thrusts include but are not limited to the following:

• Developing advanced simulators for system-level testing and verification of IoT systems;

• Building self-adaptivity into IoT systems to improve resilience and reduce the need for manual tuning;

• Devising IoT requirements and design quality assurance techniques for early detection of errors and thus avoiding costly fixes in later stages;

• Providing automated mechanisms for ensuring that IoT systems comply with their legal requirements in relation to, for example, safety, security and privacy;

• Embedding ethical considerations and responsible engineering into IoT development.

At Sedna, we seek to align our research with practical needs. Most of our research activities are conducted in close collaboration with our industry partners. This helps us ensure that the problems we work on are realistic and that the solutions we develop have a greater chance of being adopted in practice.

The lab is strongly committed to equity, diversity and inclusion and the effort, reflection and action required as a community to effect and sustain change.   We strive to create a welcoming space for people of any race, religion, national origin, gender identity, family commitments, political affiliation, sexual orientation, and eligible age or ability.