Richard N. Taylor

Chancellor's Professor Emeritus, Information and Computer Sciences Director Emeritus of the Institute for Software Research (ISR) Research Area: Software Engineering EMail:  taylor 'at sign goes here' uci 'dot goes here' edu Mailing Address: Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, California 92697-3440 Google Scholar Profile

Handbook of Software Engineering Provides an in-depth survey of the state-of-the-art in software engineering, covering both foundational and emerging areas Available from Springer. (c) 2019

The Taylor/Medvidovic/Dashofy textbook/reference on software architecture is available:

• Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory, and Practice at Wiley.com
• Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory, and Practice at Amazon.com

See the book's website for discussions and additional resources.

Last update: February 7, 2024

Biography

Richard N. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1980. His research interests have been centered on design and software architectures, especially event-based and peer-to-peer systems and the way they scale across organizational boundaries. Professor Taylor was the Director of the Institute for Software Research from 1999 through 2017, which was dedicated to fostering innovative basic and applied research in software and information technologies through partnerships with industry and government. He has served as chairman of ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering, SIGSOFT, chairman of the steering committee for the International Conference on Software Engineering, and was general chair of the 1999 International Joint Conference on Work Activities, Coordination, and Collaboration and the 2004 International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. He was the General Chair for the 2011 International Conference on Software Engineering, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2011.

Taylor was a 1985 recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator Award and in 1998 was recognized as an ACM Fellow. In 2005 he was awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award. In May 2008 he received ICSE's "Most Influential Paper Award", along with co-authors Peyman Oreizy and Nenad Medvidovic, for "Architecture-based runtime software evolution" from ICSE 1998. In May, 2009 he was recognized with the 2009 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award. In February 2010 he was designated a University of California, Irvine Chancellor's Professor. In 2012 he received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, and in 2017 was granted a Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award by the University of Colorado, Boulder (see two "contrasting view" photos). Also in 2017, he was granted the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award  along with Roy Fielding.

September 2020 resume with full publication list.

Research

My research has been focused on design — the issues, techniques, and agents involved in creating and evolving software artifacts and processes. Specific emphases include:

• software architecture: means for designing, organizing, and describing distributed and decentralized applications.
• architecture-based software development environments: tools to support the conceptual approach, ranging from design-time tools to implementation to run-time dynamic adaptation.

The foundational work on architectures centered on means for describing architectures in various styles and development of new architectural styles (notably the "C2" components-and-connectors style and, with Roy Fielding, the REST style for Internet applications such as the WWW).

The environment and tools work has had emphases on environment architectures (see the ArchStudio site for details), an extensible software architecture description language and supporting toolkit (see the xADL web site for the details and the download), and architecture-driven dynamic adaptation of applications. Virtually all of this work utilizes event-based approaches. A variety of publications in this area can be found at http://www.isr.uci.edu/architecture/publications.html.

Design (not just software!)

The Proposal for a School of Design at the University of California, Irvine (dated November 2002; PDF format; 188 pages; 8.5M) recommended establishment of a research-based school having an interdisciplinary approach to design and a comprehensive array of degree programs at the bachelor's, master's, and doctoral levels. The School of Design proposal was transmitted to the Irvine Division of the Academic Senate on January 13, 2003. The proposal is no longer under active consideration, but remains a vision document for the design research community--still. 

 (Andre van der Hoek and I wrote an extended paper on the future of software design and architecture, as part of FOSE 2007: Future of Software Engineering).

Institute for Software Research (ISR)

Established in July 1999, the University of California's Institute for Software Research (ISR) was dedicated to

• fostering innovative basic and applied research in software and information technologies;
• working with established companies, startups, government agencies, and standards bodies to develop and transition the technologies to widespread and practical application;
• educating the next generation of software researchers and practitioners in advanced software technologies;
• supporting the public service mission of the University of California in developing the economic basis of the State of California.

The Institute's activities focused on:

• Direct support of research projects, including funding personnel
• Research support services (administrative services)
• Conference and seminar services
• Technology transition

Graduate Students and Ph.D. Graduates

Ph.D. Graduates

I've had the privilege of supervising the following thirty Ph.D. graduates.