Home page of Prof. Kim Mens

After having obtained the university degrees of Licentiate in Mathematics and Licentiate in Computer Science, Prof. Kim Mens obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, on the topic of "architectural conformance checking", for which he used a declarative metaprogramming approach. After his PhD he became a full-time professor (chargé de cours) at the Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL). In addition to his interest in logic metaprogramming and intensional views, Kim Mens is one of the originators of the reuse contracts technique for automatically detecting conflicts in evolving software. He has been formally involved in several research networks related to software evolution. He has a strong interest in object-oriented and aspect-oriented software development and has actively participated in the organisation of several workshops and conferences on those topics. He combines all these different research interests under the common denominator of co-evolution (between source code and earlier life-cycle software artefacts). Other research topics that fit this common theme and in which he is interested are software architecture, software maintenance, variability, reverse engineering, software transformation, software restructuring and renovation, language engineering, aspect mining and evolution of aspect programs.

RELEASeD

Kim Mens leads the growing research group RELEASeD, the REsearch Laboratory on software Evolution And Software Development Technology, which focusses on a variety of research topics related to programming technology, languages and tool support for software development. The main research themes of this research group are:

1. Software Evolution

   In this theme we investigate advanced mechanisms, languages, formalisms, methodologies and tools to support software engineers during maintenance and evolution of a software system. This includes a variety of techniques to:

   • detect, discover and verify structural and behavioural regularities in software systems;
   • co-design and co-evolve a software system and its structural and behavioural regularities;
   • early detect inconsistencies and irregularities in the software upon evolution of that software;
   • deal with variability in software development;
   • support software restructuring, re-engineering and reverse engineering in general.

2. Software Development Technology

   In this theme we investigate and advance the state-of-the art in software development technology. We address the problem mainly from a language engineering angle, as a means to study:

   • the automated transformation and translation of programs written in one language to another language;
   • research on advanced program query languages;
   • advanced language features for aspect-oriented programming;
   • novel programming paradigms and language concepts;
   • new program development approaches;
   • metaprogramming and reflection;
   • generative programming in general.

3. Aspect Orientation

   As one of the most recent emerging software development paradigms, we are strongly interested in technology to support the evolution and development of aspect-oriented software. More specifically, we study, amongst other things:

   • advanced language engineering for aspect-oriented programming;
   • the use of logic query languages as advanced pointcut languages;
   • evolution and maintenance issues with aspect-oriented software;
   • aspect mining tools and techniques;
   • migration of traditional software towards aspects;
   • alternative techniques to deal with crosscutting concerns in software.

4. Context-Oriented Programming

   With its research on the Ambience programming language and AmOS object system, the RELEASeD research group contributes to the emerging research area of context-oriented programming, by studying:

   • the conception of a pure context-oriented language for programming ambient software;
   • the development of ambient and context-oriented software systems (methodology and tools);
   • application domains and scenarios that could benefit from such context-oriented technology.

Kim Mens is in charge of the organisation of the INGI Research Meetings (or IRM, for short), which constitute the computer science department's primary forum for researchers, assistants and visitors to present their ongoing research. Amongst others, the meetings are an excellent opportunity for researchers to get early feedback on their work and to forge new collaborations with other researchers at the department.