Jyotishman Pathak, Samik Basu, Robyn Lutz, and Vasant Honavar receive the Best Paper Award at IEEE ICTAI 2006

The paper "Selecting and Composing Web Services Through Iterative Reformulation of Functional Specifications" authored by Computer Science Ph.D. student  Jyotishman Pathak and Computer Science faculty  Dr. Samik Basu, Dr. Robyn Lutz and Dr. Vasant Honavar received the C.V. Ramamoorthy award for the best paper at the IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2006), held at Washington, DC, during November 13-15, 2006. The paper proposes a specification-driven approach to Web service composition. Web services are playing an increasingly important role in applications such as e-Science, e-Government, and e-Commerce. The authors' approach allows users to specify an abstract and possibly incomplete specification of the desired service (goal) that can be realized by selecting and composing a set of pre-existing services. In the event that such a composition is unrealizable, i.e. the composition is not functionally equivalent to the goal or the non-functional requirements are violated, the proposed system provides the user with the causes for the failure, that can be used to appropriately reformulate the functional and/or non-functional requirements of the goal specification. The authors have recently extended the approach to consider both functional and non-functional specifications in service composition. This project is the result of a collaboration between the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory, the Laboratory for Software Safety, and the Software Systems Specification and Verification Group  at Iowa State University and is supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation.