AWARDS

Biography

Dr. Stephanie White, is Senior Professor at Long Island University (LIU) Post. She teaches a doctoral level course in systems theory, paradigms and methods and undergraduate and master's level courses in computer science and systems engineering. She serves as dissertation advisor and a member of dissertation committees. Her research interests are software and systems science and engineering with emphasis on complex systems. Stephanie White has also researched issues with recruitment and advancement of women in computing, leading an IEEE Computer Society committee to better understand these issues and determine what the Computer Society can do to help women enter and succeed in the computing profession. She was awarded the IEEE-USA Divisional Professional Leadership Award for inspiring women to study and work in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, and for leadership in diversity initiatives.

Previously Stephanie was Principal Engineer of requirements and architecture for the Northrop Grumman Advanced Technology and Development Center in Bethpage, New York. During her twenty year career at Grumman, she was Principal Investigator on a number of research contracts provided by Naval Research Laboratory and other agencies; she developed methods and published research on classifying and analyzing complex system requirements, specifying software behavior, and evaluating the consistency of software models. She led an inter-divisional team solving system/software engineering interface issues and served on the Integrated Methods Technical Advisory Group at the Software Productivity Consortium. She transferred technology to Grumman aircraft programs, was software lead on Grumman proposals, and managed aerospace personnel responsible for software requirements and architecture on major aircraft and space contracts. Appointed by the National Research Council, she served for three years as a member of the Board on Assessment of NIST Programs, Panel for Information Technology. The Board submits an annual report to the United States Congress. 

In 1986, Stephanie developed one of the first requirements databases for the X-29 Forward Swept Wing experimental aircraft program. The F-14D fighter aircraft program, using Stephanie’s algorithms, detected inconsistencies in mode transition prior to writing code, reducing the need for expensive software changes later in the project.  The EA-6B electronic warfare aircraft program used Stephanie White’s specification methods to improve their process for deriving tests from requirements, resulting in a higher quality jamming system. The A-6E attack aircraft program used her techniques for analyzing mode transition tables to analyze the Attack Mode specification for errors. Stephanie worked on a number of Grumman Aircraft and Space Systems proposals, including development of a satellite system to track ICBMs in their boost phase (BSTS/FEWS), and development of a Robotic Servicer to service the International Space Station. The FEWS proposal was several years in duration as the proposal team worked with the Concept Exploration/Demonstration and Validation team. In 1999, the Office of Naval Research awarded the company she owned a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contract to develop a process centered environment that emphasizes situation assessment and decision making.

Her publications, presentations, and the workshops she led made significant contributions to the semantics of requirements languages when requirements methods were still in their infancy, not well documented, and in general poorly understood. She experimented with requirements languages and associated methods and documented the results extensively, including language features, formalisms and properties, so that researchers could compare them. In 1989, referring to requirements methods, Dennis and William Wood at Carnegie Mellon University wrote “For those interested in a detailed technical dissection of the many interesting semantic issues of these and other [requirements] methods, we recommend A Pragmatic Formal Method for Computer System Definition by Stephanie White [White87] as a good source of information”, see CMU/SEI-89-TR-036/ESD-89-TR-047. A number of computer scientists doing research in requirements analysis have based their research in part on an algorithm Stephanie developed during her work at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), see C. Heitmeyer, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, July 1996.

Stephanie is a Senior Life Member of the IEEE. She was President of the IEEE Systems Council 2018-2019, and served on the IEEE Technical Activities Board during this time. She served on the IEEE Publications Products and Services Board (PSPB) for six years as Chair of the IEEE Thesaurus Editorial Board. She was an active volunteer in the Computer Society (CS) for many years, serving on the CS Board of Governors and as CS Vice President of Technical Activities. She has been both a Systems Council Distinguished Lecturer and a Computer Society Distinguished Visiting Professional. She founded the CS Technical Committee on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems (ECBS), serving as its Vice Chair and Chair. As Guest Editor for IEEE Computer, she educated CS members on the issues and advances in ECBS.