ANALYZE SOFTWARE - Key Persons

Dr. Pidgeon received a B.S. in Business with a major in Computer Information Systems (1976) and a Masters in Business Administration (1978) from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1990) from the University of California at Irvine where he studied with the Reusable Software Engineering group under the direction of Dr. Peter Freeman (now the Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology). From 1979 to 1991 Dr. Pidgeon taught undergraduate and graduate courses for the Computer Information Systems Department at Cal Poly, Pomona. From 1988 to 1992 Pidgeon was a scientist with Hughes Space & Communications Group. From 1992 to 1995 he was a director with Cambridge Technology Partners. In 1995 Pidgeon co-founded Semantic Designs with Dr. Ira D. Baxter, where he served as Semantic Designs CEO. Chris Pidgeon passed away suddenly in January of 2003. His vision of advanced software engineering marches on in Semantic Designs.

Job Titles:

• Principal Engineer
• Expert on Information
• Lead Research Engineer for the Development of the DMS Reengineering Toolkit

Dr. Michael Mehlich joined Semantic Designs in 1996. As Principal Engineer, he has significantly contributed to creating and enhancing the company's core technology, the Design Maintenance System, or DMS. Michael is accomplished in numerous commercial applications for DMS and is responsible for system robustness as well as numerous function and language additions Author of numerous Software Engineering papers, Dr. Mehlich received his Dr. Rer. Nat. in Computer Science in 1995 from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Dr. Mehlich is an expert on information theory, with a special focus on formal methods and tools for software engineering. He received a Diploma in Computer Science 1992 from the Universität Passau and a Dr. rer. nat. in Computer Science 1995 from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. During his studies he was introduced to formal methods and became immediately convinced of their significance to increase the robustness and reliability of software. Dr. Mehlich has continuously sought ways to advance the practical use of formal methods in software engineering during his career in academia and industry.

Job Titles:

• Chief Executive Officer
• Founders
• Principal Architect of Semantic Designs' Design Maintenance System

Dr. Ira Baxter co-founded of Semantic Designs as Chief Technical Officer. He took the role of CEO in 2003 after the loss of his co-founder, Dr. Christopher Pidgeon. Ira has over 35 years of hardware and software development, management and consulting experience, including Schlumberger, Microelectronics Computing Consortium (MCC) Rockwell Automation and Software Dynamics. He holds two patents and has chaired sections for several Software Engineering and Development Conferences. Ira received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine in 1990. Dr. Baxter has been involved with computing since 1966, initially in hardware working with relay, discrete transistor logic and early Diode-Transistor Logic ICs. He learned to program with IBM 1401 (Autocoder), 1620 (Fortran) and 360 systems (BAL, PL/1, APL). He implemented one of the first commercial minicomputer timesharing systems on a Data General Nova in 1970, before receiving his B.S. in Computer Science (1973). During a brief stint in the numerical controls business, he designed and implemented a complete 16 bit virtual memory minicomputer, its OS and development tools for automated milling systems. In 1976, he started Software Dynamics, a systems software house, where he designed compilers, time-sharing and distributed network operating systems. The similarity in concepts and dissimilarity in implementation of the various OSes suggested that managing designs was key to managing long-lived software systems, and turned Ira's interests towards deeper software engineering research. In 1990, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine, where he studied Software Engineering, focusing on design reuse using transformational methods. Dr. Baxter spent several years with Schlumberger, working on a PDE-solver generator for CM-5 supercomputers (Sinapse). He was consulting Research Scientist for Rockwell International, focusing on industrial control automation software engineering tools for several years. In 1995, he founded Semantic Designs, to build commercial tools that will radically improve the methods and economics of software enhancement and maintenance. At Semantic Designs, he provides consulting to Fortune 100 companies on automated software analysis, transformation and domain-specific synthesis methods. For the last decade, he has been SD's principal management, supporting marketing and sales, and provides project vision, management and technical architecture to SD's large custom-software customers. Dr. Baxter is the principal architect of Semantic Designs' Design Maintenance System (DMS), principal designer and compiler implementer of PARLANSE, Semantic Designs' parallel programming language, and architect and principal engineer on CloneDR, SD's unique AST-based Clone Detection technology. At SD, he has been the Principal Investigator on a number of software-engineering related SBIRs and STTRs, covering topics such as Multilingual Architecture Recovery, Dynamic Trace Capture and Analysis, Modular Transliteration Systems, Detection of Malware, and Code Generation for Multicore Compilers. Dr. Baxter joined the Association for Computing Machinery in 1970, is an ACM Senior Member and a Life Member. He joined the IEEE Computer Society in 1973, and is an IEEE Senior Member. He joined the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1983, and is a Life Member.