About

Ian Gorton is a professor of the practice and the director of mobility programs in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Seattle. He is passionate about analyzing and designing complex, high-performance distributed systems, and strives to instill design and architecture principles in methods and tools that can be exploited by architects for other projects. Before joining Northeastern in 2015, he was a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, where he designed massively scalable software architectures for big data applications and built knowledge bases to support engineering tasks using both manual methods and machine learning. Prior to that, Gorton was a laboratory fellow in computational sciences and math at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, managing the Data Intensive Scientific Computing research group and serving as the chief architect for the lab's Data Intensive Computing Initiative. His research experience includes projects in environmental modeling, carbon capture and sequestration, and bioinformatics, which have contributed to his interest in designing large-scale, highly customizable cyber-infrastructures for scientific research. Gorton is a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society, with previous industry and academic experience at National ICT Australia, CSIRO, IBM, Microsoft, and in Australia.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Mathematics education
• Pedagogy
• Medical education

Selected publications

• Distributed Systems - Concepts Every Software Architect Should Know

  2024-06-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Modern software systems in every application domain are increasingly built as distributed systems. Business applications are structured as cooperating microservices, IoT devices communicate with cloud-based services over a network, and Web sites store data in globally dispersed data centers to support fast access in to localities in which their users reside. Behind all these systems lurk distributed computing infrastructures that architects and engineers must exploit to satisfy application service level agreements. To be successful, it is essential that architects understand the inherent complexity of distributed systems. In this half day tutorial, I'll guide the attendees through the fundamental characteristics that distributed systems exhibit. Each characteristic will be related to the software architecture quality attributes that they directly impact. The topics covered include communications reliability and latencies, message delivery semantics, state management, idempotence, data safety, consistency, time, distributed consensus, cascading failures and failover and recovery. I'll introduce each concept using an example distributed system and multiple 'props' to illustrate concepts. Once I've explained a concept using the example, I'll move on to show how the concept manifests itself in a software system and its effects on quality attributes requirements and inherent trade-offs. The tutorial will be suitable for graduate students, engineers and architects who have no or minimal exposure to distributed systems concepts. The presentation format will be suitable for a mix of both in person and remote participants. It will combine interactive sessions with short technical explanations and examples to illustrate each distributed systems concept.

  PublisherDOI

• MEnTr@LT-EDI-2024: Multilingual Ensemble of Transformer Models for Homophobia/Transphobia Detection

  2024-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Detection of Homophobia and Transphobia in social media comments serves as an important step in the overall development of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).In this research, we describe the system we formulated while participating in the shared task of Homophobia/Transphobia detection as a part of the Fourth Workshop On Language Technology For Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (LT-EDI-2024) at EACL 2024 1 .We used an ensemble of three state-of-the-art multilingual transformer models, namely Multilingual BERT (mBERT), Multilingual Representations for Indic Languages (MuRIL) and XLM-RoBERTa to detect the presence of Homophobia or Transphobia in YouTube comments.The task comprised of datasets in ten languages -Hindi, English, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Spanish and Tulu.Our system achieved rank 1 for the Spanish and Tulu tasks, 2 for Telugu, 3 for Marathi and Gujarati, 4 for Tamil, 5 for Hindi and Kannada, 6 for English and 8 for Malayalam.These results speak for the efficacy of our ensemble model as well as the data augmentation strategy we adopted for the detection of anti-LGBT+ language in social media data.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Technical Credit

  Communications of the ACM · 2024-12-26 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Balancing initial investment and long-term results in the software development process.

  PublisherDOI

• Deployment Architectures of MQTT Brokers in Event-Driven Industrial Internet of Things

  2024-11-03 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) involves various standards, protocols, and tools, requiring extensive expertise for system design. The traditional automation pyramid limits scalability due to tightly-coupled components. Integrating IIoT data in the cloud through event-driven communication, like MQTT brokers, provides loose coupling. This integration also aids in resource monitoring and planning, enhancing IIoT application performance. Despite many IIoT architecture studies, there is a lack of empirical comparisons of MQTT broker deployment strategies. This paper examines an edge-cloud aggregation scenario, where IIoT device requests are aggregated at the edge and fog services before being transmitted to the cloud. We study four MQTT deployment architectures and compare the results empirically. We use an Arduino Opta as an IIoT device. Also, we use software-based load generation to support replicability of our experiment and reproducibility of our results. Findings indicate that a central broker on a dedicated virtual machine gives 13.8% improvements of the mean response time compared to the shared deployment of MQTT broker and device gateways. Our results offer insights into effective deployment strategies.

  PublisherDOI

• Integrated Safety and Security by Design in the IT/OT Convergence of Industrial Systems: A Graph-Based Approach

  2024-07-07 · 1 citations

  article

  The convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) in Industry 4.0 poses fresh challenges, demanding innovative strategies to ensure the safe execution of production processes. With the increasing significance of production system integrity, any security breaches can lead to severe consequences like production downtime, equipment damage, or human harm. Our prior research on Austrian industrial automation stakeholders highlighted the necessity for a cost-effective, all-encompassing approach to the integrated safety and security. We introduced an extensive ontology for safety, security, and operational requirements in IT/OT convergence. This paper presents an approach of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) for the integrated safety and security by design of industrial systems. We employ the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) 2.0 for precise modeling. We define metadata information that are used as tags for SysML 2.0 model instances. Afterwards, we create a graph-based model of the system. These graphs are used to validate safety and security standards and requirements. Finally, we automatically generate artifacts, such as code or documentation, which adhere to the standards. Our approach is extensible and supports reusability already after covering two standards. Having provided support for the standards IEC 62443-3-3 and IEC 61508, we reuse our approach to validate the standard ISO 13850:2015.

  PublisherDOI

• Observability Q&A

  IEEE Software · 2023-12-22 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The ability to monitor the state of a system and take corrective actions based on insights derived from this monitoring is the essence of observability. Observability is an intrinsic ingredient of modern highly scalable and available software systems. In this article we survey the thoughts of two experts in the area of observability. They provide deep insights into the current state of the art and future directions in observability practices and technology.

  PublisherDOI

• Distributed Systems — What Every Software Architect Should Know

  2023-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Modern software systems in every application domain are increasingly built as distributed systems. Business applications are structured as cooperating microservices, IoT devices communicate with cloud-based services over a network, and Web sites store data in globally dispersed data centers to support fast access in to localitiesin which their users reside. Behind all these systems lurk distributed computing infrastructures that architects and engineers must exploit to satisfy application service level agreements. To be successful, it is essential that architects understand the inherent complexity of distributed systems.In this half day tutorial, I’ll guide the attendees through the fundamental characteristics that distributed systems exhibit. Each characteristic will be related to the software architecture quality attributes that they directly impact. The topics covered include communications reliability and latencies, message delivery semantics, state management, idempotence, data safety, consistency, time, distributed consensus, cascading failures and failover and recovery. I’ll introduce each concept using an example distributed system and multiple ‘props’ to illustrate concepts. Once I’ve explained a concept using the example, I’ll move on to show how the concept manifests itself in a software system and its effects on quality attributes requirements and inherent trade-offs.The tutorial will be suitable for graduate students, engineers and architects who have no or minimal exposure to distributed systems concepts. The presentation format will be suitable for a mix of both in person and remote participants. It will combine interactive sessions with short technical explanations and examples to illustrate each distributed systems concept.

  PublisherDOI

• Software Architectures for AI Systems: State of Practice and Challenges

  2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• APSEC 2023 Tutorials

  2023-12-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Modern software systems in every application domain are increasingly built as distributed systems. Business applications are structured as cooperating microservices, IoT devices communicate with cloud-based services over a network, and Web sites store data in globally dispersed data centers to support fast access for localities in which their users reside. Behind all these systems lurk distributed computing infrastructures that software architects and engineers must exploit to satisfy application service level agreements. To be successful, it is essential that engineers understand the inherent complexity of distributed systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• WADER at SemEval-2023 Task 9: A Weak-labelling framework for Data augmentation in tExt Regression Tasks

  2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Intimacy is an essential element of human relationships and language is a crucial means of conveying it. Textual intimacy analysis can reveal social norms in different contexts and serve as a benchmark for testing computational models’ ability to understand social information. In this paper, we propose a novel weak-labeling strategy for data augmentation in text regression tasks called WADER. WADER uses data augmentation to address the problems of data imbalance and data scarcity and provides a method for data augmentation in cross-lingual, zero-shot tasks. We benchmark the performance of State-of-the-Art pre-trained multilingual language models using WADER and analyze the use of sampling techniques to mitigate bias in data and optimally select augmentation candidates. Our results show that WADER outperforms the baseline model and provides a direction for mitigating data imbalance and scarcity in text regression tasks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Liming Zhu

  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

  29 shared

• Muhammad Ali Babar

  Prince Sultan University

  28 shared

• Yan Liu

  21 shared

• Innes Jelly

  University of Sheffield

  18 shared

• Minghui Zhou

  16 shared

• Yuxia Zhang

  16 shared

• Adam Wynne

  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

  14 shared

• Jian Yin

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society
• Fellow of the Australian Computer Society