Mohamad Kassab

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Engineering Division

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) are composed of multiple independent systems called constituents that, together, achieve a set of goals by means of emergent behaviors. Those behaviors can be deliberately planned as a combination of the individual functionalities (herein named as features ) provided by the constituents. Currently, SoS engineers heavily rel...

Sneakers were designated as the most counterfeited fashion item online, with three times more risk in a trade than any other fashion purchase. As the market expands, the current sneaker scene displays several vulnerabilities and trust flaws, mostly related to the legitimacy of assets or actors. In this paper, we investigate various blockchain-based...

Lyzis Labs is an incentive-driven and democratic protocol built upon a decentralized online marketplace based on blockchain technology. The major proposal of the protocol, Lyzis Marketplace, allows two or more people to be securely connected in a decentralized way without going through a Trusted Third Party (TTP) to perform physical asset exchanges...

Security and reliability in Blockchain software systems is a major challenge in Blockchain Oriented Software Engineering. One of the most critical components to address at the architectural level is the consensus protocol, as it serves as the mechanism for accepting valid transactions and incorporating them into the ledger history. Given that this...

This paper explores the potential of blockchain technology to improve cross-border trade by providing a secure and transparent way to track and verify the movement of goods, services, and funds across borders. By creating a tamper-proof record of transactions, blockchain can reduce fraud and increase transparency in the supply chain, as well as str...

The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a significant role in advancing Agro 4.0 in Brazil. This article explores current IoT trends, benefits, and challenges of the IoT in the agriculture industry.

Testing for critical AI systems is non-trivial as these systems are prone to a new breed of sophisticated software defects. The admissibility of these systems and their fundamental social acceptance is tightly coupled with assuring whether the potential hazards to humans, animals, and property posed by the prospect defects can be minimized and limi...

Safety and trust are two of the most important features in a critical system. A critical system is one that must be highly reliable in that it not only completes its mission but causes zero harm to the public. The problem is testing a critical system, especially if it employs artificial intelligence (AI). The challenge is critical AI systems (CAIS)...

A challenging problem for software and systems engineers is to provide assurance of operations for a system that is critical but must operate in situations that cannot be easily created in the testing lab. For example, a space system cannot be fully tested in all operational modes until it is launched and nuclear power plants cannot be tested under...

With the increasing ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT), some issues with satisfying quality requirements are emerging. This article discusses the current landscape and concerns about IoT quality requirements.

Four exploratory surveys were conducted in 2003, 2008, 2013, and 2020 on the state of practice of requirements engineering. This article creates a panoramic view of the changes to the landscape of industrial practices by analyzing the responses from the four surveys.

Open banking (OB) is a special kind of financial ecosystem governed by certain security profiles, application interfaces, and guidelines with the objective of improving customer choices and experiences. OB also makes it easier for new entries into the financial business sector.

The term “open banking” defines a special kind of financial ecosystem that involves special security protocols, application interfaces, and stakeholder guidelines to provide enriched customer choices and experiences. An open banking ecosystem can provide more information and options to individuals and small to mid-size businesses. With open banking...

The Executable Models (ExM) research area is an ascending discipline that explores the use of models capable of being executed during the software development process. The research area is overloaded with terms and concepts derived from several areas. There is also ambiguities and an absence of consensus on definitions. This is a problem not only f...

The novel coronavirus that causes the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread all over the world at an unprecedented rate. With growing recognition of the distributed nature of health services, the technology of blockchain has recently reached the impetus of the healthcare domain. This article provides: 1) a panoramic overview of existing so...

The need for cybersecurity education has grown significantly for all citizens. However, cybersecurity education has not been adequately addressed in fields outside of this domain. Cybersecurity concerns increase every time a new device connects to a network. As such, we need to increase involvement and advancement of cybersecurity education at all...

There is an indisputable industrial need for highly skilled individuals in the role of blockchain engineers. However, little is known about the typology of activities which fall under the blockchain engineers’ responsibilities and the competencies and experiences sought from employers’ perspectives. To shed light about the main characteristics of t...

The smart home (SH) concept is built around systems and devices to increase the comfort, energy efficiency, privacy, and safety of its inhabitants and their data. These technologically advanced homes are multifaceted, complex systems that deserve to be studied to improve upon those concepts. Nevertheless, there is a lack of consensus upon the exist...

Since the genesis case was confirmed in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading all over the world at an accelerating rate. Almost immediately, IoT technologies were deployed in various surveillance scenarios as part of an effort to combat the pandemic. Among the emerging solutions, contact tracin...

The smart home (SH) concept is built around systems and devices to increase the comfort, energy efficiency, privacy, and safety of its inhabitants and their data. These technologically advanced homes are multifaceted, complex systems that deserve to be studied to improve upon those concepts. Nevertheless, there is a lack of consensus upon the exist...

There is an indisputable industrial need for highly skilled individuals in the role of software testers. However, little is known about what activities under testers’ responsibilities, competencies, and experiences sought after from employers’ perspectives. For the purpose of this research, a data set of 1000 job ads related to software testing rol...

System-of-Systems (SoS) has consolidated itself as a special type of software-intensive systems. As such, subtypes of SoS have also emerged, such as Cyber-Physical SoS (CPSoS) that are formed essentially of cyber-physical constituent systems and Systems-of-Information Systems (SoIS) that contain information systems as their constituents. In contras...

Software economics, acquisition, and pricing are important con- cerns for Systems-of-Systems (SoS). SoS are alliances of independent software- intensive systems combined to offer holistic functionalities as a result of the con- stituents interoperability. SoS engineering involves separately acquiring con- stituents and combining them to form the So...

Internet of Things is a rapidly growing network of a variety of different connected objects. Now, because of their ubiquitous nature, educational institutions are looking to incorporate IoTs technologies in teaching and learning activities. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the benefits and challenges of incorporating IoTs in educ...

Systems supporting financial dealings at an enterprise scale must be able to handle large volumes of transactions in a secure manner while maintaining high level of operational availability. These systems must also have the flexibility to interface with many third-party applications with ease. In this paper we explore these architectural considerat...

With close to 20.4 billion devices connected to the Internet to be deployed by 2020, Internet of things (IoT) is already being leveraged in diverse sectors. Now, because of the ubiquitous nature of IoT devices, schools and academic institutions are looking to incorporate IoT in educational activities. With the increased use of IoT in the education...

Internet of Things (IoT)-based software architectures are rapidly growing as a network of connected objects. Because of their ubiquitous nature, educational institutions are looking to incorporate IoT technologies in the teaching and learning activities. However, software architectures conceived to be deployed in the scholar environment can have an...

Healthcare is a data-intensive domain, once a considerable volume of data is daily to monitoring patients, managing clinical research, producing medical records, and processing medical insurance claims. While the focus of applications of blockchain in practice has been to build distributed ledgers involving virtual tokens, the impetus of this emerg...

Smart cities are a standard concept of automated and sustainable cities that adopt technology to increase efficiency in communication, management and globalization of information. Despite the success of the concept, there is an emerging need to develop and deploy software and software-based systems for these cities. Thus, agile methodologies can pl...

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotics cannot be considered two separate domains these days. The Internet of Robotics Things (IoRT) is a concept that has been recently introduced to describe the integration of robotics technologies in IoT scenarios. As a consequence, these two research fields have started interacting, and thus linking research c...

Healthcare systems have been supported by technology to help improve the user experience with the entire health system. However, many operational challenges still remain, in particular those related to a unified management of electronic health records (EHR) that could enable multiple doctors to have access to the complete health history of his/her...

Healthcare is a data-intensive domain, once a considerable amount of data is daily produced due to monitoring patients, managing identities, producing medical records and processing medical insurance claims. Hence, security, besides other quality requirements, is prominent to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of such data. Blockchain techn...

Educating the next generation of engineers to be able to design and develop the rapidly increasing need for Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber Physical System (CPS) devices is imperative. The goal of this study is to determine the state of this educational need. This paper presents a: (1) mapping study to learn about existing research and proposed...

Software architecture involves a series of decisions based on many factors in a wide range of software development. Architects face recurring issues in different software architecture design, and to reduce huge cost and risks, software architecture decisions can rely on a set of idiomatic patterns commonly named architectural styles or patterns. Ar...

[Background] Prior research on the professional occupation of Requirements Engineering (RE) in Europe and Latin America indicated incongruities between RE practice as perceived by industry and as in textbooks, and conducted detailed analysis of both RE and non-RE job aspects. Relatively little is published on the RE competencies and skills industry...

The Internet of Things (IoT), with its distinguished features such as sensing and intelligence (artificial and regular), can support and significantly benefit the pedagogical processes for all interrelated actors (faculty, students, and staff) as well as all assets involved (libraries, classrooms, and labs).

Software economics, acquisition, and pricing are important concerns, in particular for Systems-of-Systems (SoS). SoS are alliances of independent software-intensive systems combined to offer holistic functionalities as a result of the constituents interoperability. SoS engineering involves separately acquiring constituents and combining them to for...

Software economics, acquisition, and pricing are important concerns, in particular for Systems-of-Systems (SoS). SoS are alliances of independent software-intensive systems combined to offer holistic functionalities as a result of the constituents interoperability. SoS engineering involves separately acquiring constituents and combining them to for...

This article argues that it is time for a new engineering/computer science discipline to emerge that is focused on Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems.

The software becomes increasingly a core integrated part of the safety-critical systems. Unfortunately, little contemporary data exists to document the actual practices used by software professionals for software testing and quality assurance activities for software in safety-critical systems. To remedy the deficiency of lack of data, we conducted a...

This paper describes the results and analysis of a systematic mapping study of research focusing on the nonfunctional requirements in software intensive medical devices. The review covered 238 journal papers from five digital libraries. The 55 papers that met the review inclusion criteria focused on 22 NFRs, each describing a unique system behavior...

Software in medical devices can be used in many ways to improve patient outcomes. Little contemporary data exists to document the actual practices used by software professionals for software engineering activities while building Software intensive medical devices. A carefully constructed survey has the potential to: 1) remedy the deficiency of lack...