ÉTS : Research areas

Alain April

B.Sc.A., M.Sc.A. (UQAM), Ph.D Software Engineering – Magdeburg Univeristat, Germany

Professor

Full Professor - Department of Software and IT Engineering

My areas of applied research with industry are:

Artificial Intelligence : Artificial intelligence technology is readily available to be used by industry. For these industrial projects (i.e. Banking, Manufacturing, Construction, Helathcare) we identify a targeted AI technology and develop a quick proof of concept to quikly start an initiative. See the AI interview on BNN on 11-09-2017.

Big Data and Data Science : BigData technology can help with the analysis of a massive amount of heterogeneous data used currently in the industry. This can also be viewed as a controlled evolution process using conversion/migration activities to Big Data technology that can offer low cost and scalable technologies. I am also part of the ISO/SC38 'Cloud Comptuting committee' and ISO/JTC1/WG9 on BigData.

AWS Montréal Region Launch: Prof. Alain April was invited at the official launch on December 8th 2016. During this event, we have discussed the contractual and technical challenges of moving to the Cloud.

Lina Trudeau Pierre Lussier Nick Oddson Dr.Alain April

AWS Jour de la terre Desire2Learn ÉTS University

Law: I am currently developing a court scheduling tool to facilitate the Calendar scheduling of all parties involved. Canadian and Quebec government are trying to accelerate the process using a new protocol.

Healthcare research BigData Genomics and Analytics: this software engineering research area investigates the continuous evolution of information technology, biomedical equipments and research support technologies in healthcare. This problem can be viewed as an evolution strategy which needs to be developed/enacted for efficiencies and competitiveness of research labs located in Quebec hospitals that are having a hard time manage and analyse the growing amount of data coming from all sources (animals, patients, diagnostics, medication, biochemical, biometry, Elisa, histology, genomics and clinical trials) ;

Business Process Management (BPM): This research area aims at the evolution of graphical representation of processes/procedures and its implementation/evolution in corporations (for example: conversion of the management view (drawn typically using Visio) to the IT view (typically using BPMN and UML), multi-perspective representation of process controls). This area requires that we master the industrial toolset of BPM and ALM tools.

Manufacturing Industry: Study of real-time CMM data capture on the shop floor to feed an SaaS-SPC on Microsoft Azure to quickly identify defects. Next step is to use this data to predict potetial defects using machine learning.

Construction industry: This research area aims at developing a cloud based environmental impacts of a construction project (LCA calculator ). The solution named UBUBI will allow to present LCA information about the project, graphically, in real-time. This open source LCA software will allow to interface with the most popular existing construction sofwares (i.e. Revit first, then Bentley, ArchiCAD, ...) and remove the need to install/configure complex software/hardware to assess the environmental impact of the proposed project as it will operate on the cloud, for example AWS.

Software Maintenance process improvement (S3M) best practices: this research developed a process improvement model (including best practices) for small software maintenance activities not covered by the CMMI or ITIL. A large number of companies are using this approach published in many books. I was also the editor of the SWEBOK software maintenance chapter and certification courses in the USA.

Software Quality Assurance : (SQA) This research work has lead to the publication of the SWEBOK software quality assurance (SQA) chapter and aims at teaching how to implement SQA in practice. Two french books have been published in 2011 (AQL1 et AQL2) and will be available in English, by Wiley/IEEE editor, in 2016.

Français

Office: A-4467
Phone: 514 396-8682
Fax: 514 396-8405

alain.april@etsmtl.ca