Custom solutions

by Linda Charles
Think how simple it would be if businesses could update or evolve their software systems by using a "find and replace" system. ISU researchers have developed sophisticated software -- the Knowledge-Centric Software (KCS) framework -- that does just that.

The technology initially was developed at Iowa State's Software Engineering Research Laboratory by Suraj Kothari, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his students. The Iowa State Research Foundation holds two patents on the technology.

Kothari and Jeremias Sauceda, a senior in electrical engineering, founded EnSoft Corp., a startup company at the ISU Research Park that uses KCS to provide custom solutions for large corporate customers.

The company has helped keep young people in Iowa by hiring five full-time and three part-time employees, all Iowa State grads. The company's technology has attracted the interest of major financial and insurance companies in Des Moines and Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids. They are using the technology in the form of tool-based services and customized KCS tools. And EnSoft has attracted its first international investor this year.

If KCS were just a word processing program, its "find and replace" function not only could substitute the word "race" for "run," but find all variations of the word "race" and replace it with the proper tense of "run."

But KCS is not a word processing program. Instead, it is capable of capturing the syntax and semantics of programming languages, data flow, control flow and the class and object relationships of software. KCS also can target specific application domains and use the special characteristics of those domains in analyzing software problems.

All of which means KCS can do things considerably faster than programmers poring through mountains of code. For example, it took four expert programmers at Argonne National Laboratory three years to transform widely used regional climate modeling software from serial to parallel processing. Using KCS, the same task was completed in three weeks.

And saving time is good for business.