Heinz Schmidt is Professor of Software Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne Australia, where he heads Distributed Software Engineering and Architecture in the School of Computer Science and directs the e-Research Office. He received his PhD from Bremen University, Germany. He is also Adjunct Professor at Maelardalen University, in Vaesteras, Sweden, and at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Prof Schmidt is internationally recognised in software engineering for parallel and distributed systems, notably systems composed of large numbers of interacting components in application areas ranging from industrial automation to telecommunication networking and artifial intelligence. He has over 30 years experience with object-oriented and component-based software architectures, languages, systems and tools in this domain, in practice, research and training. Heinz has published over 120 refereed articles on aspects of distributed and concurrent systems using Petri Nets, automata, logic, abstract data types, graphs and other methods, and on practical methods and tools for constructing and testing such systems. He has published several books and book chapters.
Over the last few years he has particularly focussed on modeling, predicting and verifying extra-functional properties in software-intensive distributed systems. Such properties include stability, availability, reliability, configurability, robustness, performance and safety properties. His research contributions include connections between Petri nets, algebra and logic, especially parameterised formal models for compositional specifications of functional and non-functional properties of software. He holds a patent in prediction of probabilistic worst-case time in software-intensive embedded control systems, jointly with ABB Germany. He has supervised and co-supervised over 25 higher-degree research students. Several of his PhD students and early career colleagues he mentored are now in leading positions in Higher-Education Institutions and industry (in Ausralia and overseas).
Heinz has also played a pivotal role in influencing and shaping the Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) research agenda internationally. For example he has organized or co-organized the CBSE symposia series; a series of special journal issues on CBSE and other events.
Heinz lectures in software engineering, programming languages and concurrent, distributed and parallel systems.
Prof Schmidt has extensive research and development experience in large scale research projects. With the German National Research Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (GMD) - now part of the Fraunhofer Institut - his group was the main contractor of a 15 million ECU collaborative ESPRIT project GRASPIN, jointly sponsored and carried out by the CEC, Olivetti, SIEMENS, several European software houses and universities. With the CSIRO Canberra and ANU CS he established and led the CSIRO Software Engineering research group in Canberra and the initial Software Engineering research program of the Advanced Computational Systems CRC in Canberra.
At Monash University he helped create and establish the Centre for Distributed Systems and Software Engineering, the Enterprise Distributed Computing Technology Centre (Melbourne), and the Monash Cluster Computing Network as outfits for several research projects he and others have been attracting and conducting.
Between his posts in Germany and Australia, Heinz worked with the International Computer Science Institute at the University California, Berkeley, where he was a key researcher in the Sather language and environment project, contributing to many aspects of the earliest Sather releases which he continued from CSIRO. Later he also contributed to Sather-K, the University Karlsruhe Sather project. At ICSI, Heinz was also the key designer of a an initial prototype of the parallel object-oriented neural network simulation environment ICSIM written in Sather.
Heinz received a number of grants from industry partly through collaborative CEC or CRC projects. Sponsors include SIEMENS, Olivetti, DIGITAL, Fujitsu, the ACSys CRC, the Australian Geoscience CRC, ABB, IBM, and others.
His leadership and management roles a Monash University have included Head of the Software Development Department, Director of the Pearcey Centre for Computing, a commercial training centre of the Faculty, Associate Dean (Research), and Director of the Distributed Systems and Software Engineering Group in the Faculty of Information Technology.
At RMIT he heads the Distributed Software Engineering and Architecture Discipline in the School of Computer Science, the Intelligent Industrial Information Technology Program of the Platforms Technologies Research Institute and spearheads the Research Technology Network, an e-Research initiative.