Dr. David J. Coe is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Coe has conducted sponsored research for a variety of government agencies including the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, NASA, and the United States Army.
His current research area is software engineering for cyber-physical systems with an emphasis on system safety and cybersecurity. Most recently, he and a team of UAH faculty have developed a new approach to verification of over-the-air software updates which is particularly applicable to smart and self-driving cars. With this approach, the release candidate software is safely tested in parallel within a virtualized environment on customer-owned vehicles prior to deployment. This allows the automaker to identify unanticipated discrepancies in behavior that may require further analysis.