Lihua Duan - Graduate Student Success Story

Ms. Duan initially obtained her Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering in China. Strongly determined later on to pursuit a career in Computer Science, she began working on her Master's at the University of Windsor by taking all the required undergraduate qualifying courses. She completed them in a short period of time with outstanding grades.

Lihua always talks all the opportunities available to expand her knowledge. She took seven graduate courses although only six were. With a strong desire in learning and enormous effort and dedication, she completed all the graduate courses with A+.

Ms. Duan possesses high level of comprehension and abstraction skills. In her Master's thesis, she had successfully made improvements on current synthesis and verification techniques on communication protocols. Her results were written with full formalization including 11 propositions and theorems with all detailed proofs. With all three absolutely positive reviewers' reports, the paper reporting her Master's thesis work [1] has been accepted for publication by Software Testing, Validation and Reliability, a prestigious international journal on Software Engineering.

During her first two years of Ph.D. study in 2005/2006 and 2006/2007, she has won the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for Science and Technology. She has passed all the 12 Ph.D. qualification exams with her first attempt, and has written six high-quality research papers. Two of these publications have appeared in prestigious LNCS series with deep technical details (18 pages and 20 pages respectively) [5,7]. Two other pieces of work [3,4] are currently published in IEEE conference proceedings which are being extended into journal versions. This is very high achievement in short time especially when most of the work involved rigorous soundness proofs for the proposed methods. We applaude Lihua’s accomplishments and appreciate her dedication. Congratulations, Lihua!
 

Publication list

1. Lihua Duan and Jessica Chen. Error-preserving Reductions on Communications Protocols. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability. Wiley InterScience. 20 pages. Accepted on July 31, 2007.
2. Lihua Duan and Jessica Chen. A Formal Approach to Website Maintenance. Proc. of the 10th International Symposium on High Assurance System Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press. Accepted on Aug.20, 2007.
3. Lihua Duan and Jessica Chen. Alternative \beta-sequences. Proc. of the 7th International Conference on Quality Software. IEEE Computer Society Press. Accepted on July 28, 2007.
4. Lihua Duan, Yan Wang and Jessica Chen. Enhanced Traverse of Web Pages. Proc. of the 10th International Symposium on High Assurance System Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press. Accepted on Aug. 13, 2007.
5. Lihua Duan and Jessica Chen. Reducing Test Sequence Length Using Invertible Sequences. Proc. of the International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol 4789, pp. 171-190, Springer-Verlag, 2007.
6. Jessica Chen and Lihua Duan. Optimal Synchronizable Test Sequence from Test Segments. Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Quality Software, pp. 266-273. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2006.
7. Jessica Chen and Lihua Duan. Conditions for Avoiding Controllability Problems in Distributed Testing. Proc. of the International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol 4260, pp. 460-477, Springer-Verlag, 2006.