Meldal, Sigurd

Meldal, Sigurd

Professor, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Computer Science

Email

Preferred: sigurd.meldal@sjsu.edu

Alternate: sigurd.meldal@mostly-sunny.com

Telephone

Preferred: (408) 924-3960

Office Hours

By appointment through the Computer Engineering Department

Interests:

  • Cybersecurity
  • Software engineering education
  • Specification and conformance of (distributed) software
  • Prototyping of distributed architectures

Education

  • Doctor of Science, Computer Science, University of Oslo, Norway, 1986
  • cand. real., Computer Science, University of Oslo, Norway, 1982

Bio

Current position:

Professor of Computer Engineering, Software Engineering and Computer Science, San Jose State University.

On the faculty of the Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments.

Commissioner, Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET, Inc.

Career:

Director, Silicon Valley Big Data and Cybersecurity Center, 2013-2016 
Co-director, NSF Science and Technology Center: Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies, 2005-2017
Chair, Academic Senate, San José State University, 2008-2009
Department Chair, San José State University, Computer Engineering Department, 2002-2014
Department Chair, Cal Poly, Computer Science Department, 2000-2002
Associate Department Chair, Computer Science Department, Cal Poly, 1999-2000
Professor, Cal Poly, 2000-2003
Associate Professor, Cal Poly, 1997-2000
Professor (Consulting/Visiting), Stanford University, 1989-1998
Professor, University of Bergen, 1989-1998
Department Chair, Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, 1993-1995
Associate Professor, University of Bergen, 1987-1989
Fulbright Scholar, Stanford University, 1986-1987
Dr. Scient., University of Oslo, 1986

Dr. Meldal has testified in federal court as an expert witness in the fields of computer science, computer engineering and software engineering. In this role, he has provided technical opinions in IP litigation regarding mobile devices, networked systems and services-oriented architectures. In particular he has assisted in litigation and related processes involving smartphones, wireless communication and telephony, networked database systems, location-oriented web services, and mobile device positioning systems.

He has offered technical opinions about IOS, Android, AMSS and Blackberry software running on Apple, Qualcomm and other mobile hardware platforms, as well as more generic software systems and networked server architectures. In several recent cases involving major technology companies, he has collaborated with an independent software litigation and website expert witness firm Quandary Peak Research, Inc. to analyze security, positioning, and signaling components within Android devices. He also has experience assisting web services firms in evaluating their IP litigation exposure.

His research interests are primarily the many aspects of concurrent processing, with an emphasis on its formalization by means of programming, prototyping and specification formalisms with supporting tools. He has participated in the definition of the Task Sequencing Language, and was a senior researcher in the project developing the Rapide language framework for prototyping of distributed architectures and the abstraction mechanisms necessary for large-scale conformance checking.

He has also established significant results in the formal theory of verification of concurrent programs, such as a compositional and fully structurally abstract reasoning system for concurrent systems with spawning and exceptions, and co-authored the seminal paper on the algebraic foundations of non-deterministic operators.

He has a strong interest in the development of a solid software engineering education, and was the primary author of Cal Poly's new undergraduate degree in software engineering as well as of the new BS and MS Software Engineering degrees at San José State University.

As Director of the Cybersecurity + Big Data Initiative he is developing new research and graduate programs in cybersecurity and data sciences, exploiting the interplay of these two fields as well as their separate and distinct promises and challenges.

He is a strong proponent of the internationalization of higher education, and in particular of the international collaboration necessary to prepare students for a global workplace. To that end he has worked with universities in India and China to establish collaborative frameworks for student and faculty exchanges, and for dual or joint degree programs bringing together students from different countries into one educational context.

He is an editor of the Nordic Journal of Computing, has published one book and more than 60 technical papers.