Faculy Profiles

Linda Laird came to Stevens from Lucent where she was the Managing Director of Lucent Worldwide Services. She had a 27-year career of software management and development, product management, and as CIO. She is currently the Director of the Software Engineering Program at the School of Systems and Enterprises, where she develops and teaches courses in Software Engineering. Professor Laird received her BS Computer Science and MS Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and has been the recipient of the Lucent CIO President's Award, Lucent Quality Achievement Award, Network Systems Quality Award. She is the author of Software Measurement and Estimation: A Practical Approach, published in 2006 by Wiley. Her research interests include estimation methodologies, complexity, and system safety and reliability.

Mark Ardis, PhD

Distinguished Service Professor Mark Ardis received a BA in Mathematics from Cornell University and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. He spent the first part of his computing career as a government contractor for NASA, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health Education and Welfare, and the Department of Defense. After completing his PhD he taught software engineering courses at the University of Illinois, Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and Carnegie Mellon University. As a member of the Educational Program at the Software Engineering Institute he helped start several new Master of Software Engineering programs.

In 1991 Dr. Ardis joined the Department of Software Production Research at Bell Laboratories, where he conducted research in formal methods and software product line engineering for systems with high reliability requirements. He returned to academia in 2000, helping to start a new Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering program at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. In 2006 Dr. Ardis joined Rochester Institute of Technology, where he was Graduate Program Coordinator for Software Engineering. In 2009 he joined Stevens Institute of Technology as Distinguished Service Professor. His research interests are in software engineering education, formal methods for specification and design, software product line engineering and software quality assurance.

Lawrence Bernstein

Larry Bernstein received a MEE in Electrical Engineering from NYU and a BEE in Electrical Engineering from Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is currently Director of Software Engineering and a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. He also serves on the board of the Center for National Software Studies headquartered in Washington, DC. He heads the New Jersey Center for Software Engineering and is an affiliate of the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Southern California. He is a Distinguished Speaker for the IEEE Computer Society on the subject of trustworthy software systems. Prior to this role, he was Executive Director at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey in the area of network management software, software routing within telephone networks, large data base systems, data communications software and military software for the Safeguard anti-missile system. He led the introduction of software project management to Bell Laboratories, taught courses in real-time software design and development in the 1960s and led a team of 500 developers to automate the outside plant records for the US telephone companies that attained expense savings of one billion dollars a year. He was recognized for his contributions to the software development field when he was appointed a fellow of both organizations. His professional and research activities emphasize software engineering and design with a focus on dependable and trustworthy software, software design simplifications and network management distributed software systems. Larry is a recognized expert in software architecture, software management, software technology, and technology conversion. He was a member of the IEEE Communications Society Board of Governors.

Larry had a 35-year distinguished career at Bell Laboratories in managing large software projects and since retirement heads his own consulting firm. At Bell Labs he became a Chief Technical Officer of the Operations Systems Business Unit and an Executive Director. In parallel with these Bell Labs positions he was the Operations Systems Vice President of AT&T Network Systems from 1992-1996.

Larry holds one patent for logic design, one for systems design and six for software innovations. He invented the concepts of “dynamic provisioning” and “routing-to-intelligence.” His patent on assignment without databases set the technology agenda for broadband network management. He championed research into software fault tolerance and demonstrated its commercial applications to the extent that it is now used in 24 products deployed in more than 500 sites to improve software system reliability. His work in universities in the United States, England, China and Russia has fostered research interest in software rejuvenation to improve reliability.

Larry joined Bell Laboratories in 1961, where he was involved in computer software and hardware design, including the design of algorithms for parallel processing and software manufacturing. In 1968, he led the development of operating systems and computer languages. He was named a Director in 1978 where he managed projects automating the business operations of the then Bell System. Today, the systems he developed are being used throughout the United States and around the world. One system handles the wiring records for 100 million telephone users. In 1986, he was appointed Executive Director of the AT&T Bell Laboratories Network Management Division where he led the implementation of AT&T’s Universal Network Management Architecture. In 1989, he was responsible for development and product management of local area networks and the UNIX Operating System.

Linda Cheng

As a senior technical manager with 30+ years tenures at leading
technology firms includes 17 years @ Bell Laboratories, Linda
Cheng has extensive experience in project management, agile
system development, large scale system integration, bleeding edge
technology roll out as well as SaaS/AoD quality engineering,
deployment & operations. She received multiple degrees in
mathematics, operations research & computer science from
universities around Washington DC. She has been a CPM from
Project Management Institute since 1995.

Robbie Cohen, PhD

Robbie Cohen joins the faculty of Stevens’ Software Engineering program after having spent 30 years in the telecommunications industry. There she held positions ranging from technical contributor to executive. While most of her telecom career was spent with Bell Laboratories, she also did multi-year stints at the Paradyne Corporation and Telcordia Technologies, as well as serving as an independent consultant. Prior to joining Bell Laboratories in 1979, Robbie was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Arthur Pyster, PhD

Dr. Art Pyster is a Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology and the Deputy Executive Director of the Systems Engineering Research Center, which is a Department of Defense’s University Affiliated Research Center. During much of 2007 and 2008, he also served as the Director of the Software Engineering Program at Stevens Institute as well as the Stevens Director for the Applied Systems Thinking Institute.

Before joining Stevens in March 2007, Dr. Pyster served as the Senior Vice President and Director of Systems Engineering and Integration for SAIC. Earlier, Dr. Pyster served as the Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Federal Aviation Administration, where he oversaw information technology investment and policy, created and operated the agency’s information security program, created the agency’s enterprise architecture, operated their process improvement program, and achieved a “green” score on the President’s Management Agenda.

Earlier assignments included being the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering for the Federal Aviation Administration, Chief Technical Officer for the Software Productivity Consortium, Director at Digital Sound Corporation, Manager of Systems Engineering at TRW, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

During his career, Dr. Pyster directed the creation of three Capability Maturity Models, oversaw more than $10 billion in investment, directed the creation of several software and systems engineering methods, delivered commercial telecommunications systems with extremely low defects, and managed training programs for thousands of engineers and managers.

His professional and research activities emphasize systems and software engineering, especially the integration of those two disciplines and their application to enterprise operations. Currently, he is leading two international research projects. The first effort is creating a reference curriculum for graduate software engineering education. Notably, that reference curriculum explicitly integrates systems engineering into the education of software engineers. The second effort is creating a body of knowledge for systems engineering as well as a reference curriculum for graduate systems engineering education.

Dr. Pyster has authored many papers and one textbook – Compiler Design and Construction. He is an INCOSE Fellow, the Chairman of the Corporate Advisory Board of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), a member of the INCOSE Board of Directors, and a senior member of the IEEE.

Stanislaw Tarchalski

Industry Professor Tarchalski comes to Stevens from Johns Hopkins University. He is a senior executive leader with more than 30 years of global experience in large scale/highly complex program management, systems engineering, system and software development; IT operations management; strategic business planning; new product development; and large scale organizational transformation. Successful application of agile, model based techniques within the Government, Aerospace, Automotive, Electronics, Communications and Architecture/Engineering/Construction industries.

Professor Tarchalski is an educator in graduate level technical management, focused on program management and systems engineering. Involved in transforming traditional curricula to include agile methods, model based approaches, technical governance and leadership, and using distance learning and collaborative techniques and technologies.

Richard Turner, PhD

Dr. Richard Turner has thirty years of experience in systems, software and acquisition engineering. He has developed and acquired software in the private and public sectors and consulted for government and commercial organizations. He is currently a Distinguished Service Professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Most recently, he was a Fellow at the Systems and Software Consortium, where he supported technical projects and provided technical exposure for the Consortium through publications, speaking and consulting. Ongoing work with DoD includes working with a wide range of research organizations to identify and transition new software-related technology and supporting the initiative to revitalize systems engineering in acquisition programs. A member of the author team for Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), he has led process improvement initiatives in information technology, system engineering and software acquisition.

He conceived and evolved the concept of the DoD Acquisition Best Practices Clearinghouse. Currently being developed by Computer Sciences Corporation, the Fraunhofer Center at the University of Maryland, and the Defense Acquisition University, the Clearinghouse is the first repository of context-specific empirical information about software and systems practices. He is co-author of three books: Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed (Addison-Wesley, 2004), co-written with Barry Boehm, CMMIsm Distilled (Addison-Wesley 2000, 2004), and CMMI Survival Guide: Just enough Process Improvement, co-authored with Suzanne Garcia (Addison-Wesley 2007). Both CMMI titles are part of Addison-Wesley’s SEI Series in Software Engineering.