McSCert research & recruiting

What we do

McSCert employs in-depth knowledge of requirements specification, incremental assurance, component qualification, verification and validation, and the development of assurance case templates.

McSCert’s research team is creating methodologies and tools that revolutionize the process of certifying critical software applications and facilitate the development and certification of critical software applications.

With an overarching goal to improve the practice of software engineering applied to critical systems involving software, McSCert:

  • performs research on how to produce software that can be certified, and on how existing software may be certified
  • works with industrial partners on the development and certification of software
  • works with regulatory authorities to improve relevant standards and approaches to software certification
  • trains graduate students in software engineering for safety critical systems, hazard analysis, model-based software development and certification
  • work with certification bodies responsible for recognizing professional engineers to improve their requirements

While our emphasis is on software, we recognize that the safety of products that depend on software is a problem in systems engineering: the hardware that contains the software has to be part of the engineering, and part of the certification.

McSCert’s research and development work has had significant commercial, economic and societal impact. In particular, we have:

  • influenced regulators at a very high level in the way they approach the problem of regulation and certification
  • generated ground-breaking knowledge and techniques we now use to build software intensive systems such that they are amenable to certification
  • contributed fundamentally to the development of principles and techniques for effective certification of such systems
Want to work with us? Learn more about our hiring
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Software Certification Consortium

The Software Certification Consortium (SCC) is an international forum for research on certification of software-intensive systems, bringing together top researchers and practitioners from regulatory agencies, industry and academia in a way that is unique in the field.

In addition to identifying and discussing research needs related to certification of software-containing systems, consortium members promote understanding of the concept of software certification and the acceptance of the need for certification standards for software-related products.

McSCert researchers co-founded the SCC, are on the steering committee, and have organized all the meetings to date.

Our publications

Explore our database of publications about a variety of topics, including software certification, model-based development, discrete-events systems, and software safety research.

Learn more about publications
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Selected McSCert projects

McSCert research and development projects usually involve close collaboration with industry partners

Principal Investigators:  

Mark Lawford, Vera Pantelic, Victor Bandur  

Description: 

The project aims to evaluate various aspects of centralized automotive E/E (Electric/Electronic) architectures, including hardware platforms, communication protocols (CAN, CAN FD, Automotive Ethernet), functional safety, and software quality. A physical prototype of an automotive electric powertrain is being built as part of a project with a large automotive company. 

Potential for HQPs involvement:  

HQPs can be involved in this project, and they will have the opportunity to work with a special-purpose hypervisor to enable the running of several virtual machines on an embedded platform; write a minimal working hypervisor from scratch; work with industrial Simulink models of both controllers and plants on a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) testing platform; and port existing industrial software to new hardware platforms. Furthermore, the resulting prototype of the powertrain E/E architecture will be evaluated for different communication protocols, including automotive Ethernet, and various schemes for the allocation of software components to available hardware units. 

Principal Investigators:

Mark Lawford, Alan Wassyng

Description:

Our team is constructing a mini city within the McMaster Automotive Resource Centre (MARC) to accommodate 1/10 scale cars and the associated infrastructure. The goal is to develop projects focusing on building infrastructure, including roads, and creating algorithms for 1/10 scale cars to enable autonomous functionality. The mini city will serve as a research and experiential learning hub for projects within the Faculty of Engineering. Currently, we have an example set of road pieces installed in our MARC lab, along with several capable cars for algorithm development. The team is also engaged in a simulation-based evaluation of a novel road topology for autonomous vehicles.

The project entails testing the current re-configurable road construction, planning additional infrastructure, potentially constructing some of that infrastructure, and implementing advanced driving systems on the 1/10 scale cars.

Potential for HQPs Involvement:

HQPs can participate in various activities, including:

  • Conducting simulations for various road topologies under different traffic conditions.
  • Implementing an effective lane-keeping algorithm on scale cars.
  • Establishing over-the-air update capability for practical and research purposes related to safety/security.
  • Designing movable structures, such as an automated parking tower.
  • Creating smart structure examples.
  • Designing city roads and highways.
  • Enabling the capability to turn on/off various communication networks (and adding new ones) for V2X communication.
  • Simulating intermittent communication problems.
  • Prototyping the addition of pedestrians, bicycles, etc.
  • Simulating night/day scenarios.
  • Simulating different weather conditions.

Principal Investigators:

Richard Paige, Alan Wassyng

Description:

This project focuses on the software engineering of different kinds of health care applications, including personalized health care applications running on mobile devices (e.g., smart watches), as well as novel ultrasound treatment devices.

Potential for HQPs Involvement:

HQPs can participate in various components of work including:

  • Automating the development of parts of a smart watch application via the use of code generation and/or user interface mockups.
  • Integration of machine learning-based models with code generators to automate personalization of user interfaces for mobile health applications.
  • Security assessment of smart watch applications for health care, where personalized data is collected and analyzed: how can we make end-users aware of the security risks associated with the use of the app, e.g., through a novel user interface?
  • Use of model transformation and/or machine translation to enable harmonization of electronic health records (building on top of Google Cloud infrastructure).
  • Enhancements to smart watch applications to support sign language users.
  • Safety assurance of novel ultrasound devices: we are constructing an assurance argument that a novel device is acceptably safe to deploy, and this argument needs to be refined, rigorously specified, and then validated with the domain experts building the device.
  • Model-based engineering of software components for an ultrasound device, emphasizing code generation of configuration data, as well as traceability between high-level requirements and the generated code.

Principal Investigator:

Sebastien Mosser

Description

This project focuses on enriching the jPipe language (https://github.com/ace-design/jpipe). So far, jPipe is a textual language used to model Justification diagrams, as a way to document different kinds of systems. A Justification diagram assembles evidence (e.g., “tests are ready”) through strategies (e.g., “execute test suite”) to reach conclusions (e.g., “quality assessed through testing”). We recently experimented with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery platforms (e.g., GitHub Action) to operationalize such justifications and execute them as CI/CD pipelines. We applied these ideas to pipelines and evaluated the reproducibility of machine learning notebooks. The jPipe environment was initially started as a summer internship and has since grown into a more fully-fledged environment with interest from industrial partners such as TELUS and Airbus. This was recently presented at CONFLANG last October: Video

Potential for HQPs Involvement:

HQPs can participate in various activities, including exploring the capacity of automating what was done manually in our initial experiments, by providing a way to transform a justification diagram into an executable GitHub action pipeline automatically.

McSCert is hiring

The McMaster Centre for Software Certification (McSCert) is a world-leading centre for research on critical systems that rely on software.

Join our team

We are interested in questions about how to be confident that the software-intensive systems we build are acceptably safe and secure to deploy.

From the healthcare systems that underpin our hospitals, to avionics and aerospace systems, to the cars that we drive, to the drones that will deliver our medication in the future, the challenges of certification are complex, sophisticated and exciting.

We are recruiting outstanding researchers at all levels to carry out interesting, industry-focused research and development in all areas of software and systems engineering.

If you have a strong software engineering background and would like to join a world-class research centre, read on!

We are recruiting  Early Career Researchers, at post-doctoral level, to work on various projects.

You will have excellent software engineering skills and a PhD in a related area. You will receive mentoring and training from McSCert faculty and researchers, including support for networking opportunities with industry leaders, opportunities for teaching and supervision of students, and many opportunities to travel to disseminate your research at conferences and industry events. Moreover, you will actively collaborate with industry partners from the transportation industry or the medical industry.

We are recruiting PhD students to work on various projects.

You will have excellent software engineering skills and a Master’s degree in a related area. You will receive mentoring and training from McSCert faculty and researchers, including support for networking opportunities with industry leaders, opportunities for teaching and supervision of undergraduate students, and many opportunities to travel to disseminate your research at conferences and industry events. Moreover, you will actively work with industry partners on real-world production-scale problems. We provide funding for you to carry out your studies and to travel to conferences to disseminate your research results.

We are recruiting Master’s students to work on various projects.

You will have excellent software engineering skills. You will receive mentoring and training from McSCert faculty and researchers, including support for networking opportunities with industry leaders, opportunities for teaching and supervision of undergraduate students, and many opportunities to travel to disseminate your research at conferences and industry events. Moreover, you will actively work with our industry partners on industrial production-scale problems. We provide funding for you to carry out your studies and to travel to conferences to disseminate your research results.

We are recruiting undergraduate students to work on various projects.

You will have excellent software engineering skills. You will receive mentoring and training from McSCert faculty and researchers, including support for networking opportunities with industry leaders, and opportunities to travel to disseminate your research at conferences and industry events. Moreover, you will actively work with our industry partners on industrial production-scale problems.

Additional information on hiring

You will be working with an international world-class team of academics, post-doctoral researchers, PhD students, Masters students, research engineers from industry, and summer students. Our research group has a strong track record of collaboration with industry. We currently have active and ongoing projects with GM, Fiat Chrysler (now Stellantis), Toyota, IBM, numerous avionics, and aerospace companies, and many more. Our postdoctoral fellows and research engineers are highly experienced at industry collaboration and academic dissemination and will help you obtain the skills you need to pursue industrial and academic careers. McMaster University is the leading research centre in the world for research in automotive software engineering and software certification.

The Centre is located in the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Hamilton is a thriving lakeside community of 550,000 people. McMaster University is situated on purpose-built accommodation next to Cootes Paradise, a protected nature reserve. As such, the University campus is very green and filled with wildlife.

Many of our researchers are based at MARC: the McMaster Automotive Research Centre, a short walk/bike ride/drive away. MARC houses one of the largest groups of researchers working on automotive engineering challenges in the world.

  • We have the equipment, know-how and connections that will help you succeed.
  • We have a thriving group of researchers with significant industry connections. You will be joining a successful team of stars and future stars.
  • We offer competitive funding and salaries for researchers, as well as funding for travel to events and conferences.
  • We are focused on helping PhD students graduate quickly. Our mentoring program is set up to give you every opportunity to complete your PhD degree within 4 years, meaning you can get out and use your world-leading expertise sooner – and make software engineering better for everyone!

For applications and informal inquiries, please email jobs@mcscert.ca. Applications should include the candidate’s resume and transcripts as well as the names and contact information for two references.