Robert B. France is a full professor at Colorado State University. His primary area of research is model-driven development (MDD).
MDD research aims to reduce the significant effort currently associated with developing and analyzing large software-intensive systems through the use of modeling languages that provide powerful abstractions, and technologies for manipulating models. Models are created for a variety of purposes, for example, to support formal analysis of functional, security or performance properties, and to support automated generation of testing, implementation, or deployment artifacts.
His research group at CSU focuses on (1) compositional approaches to model-driven software development, (2) managing model evolution, (3) rigorous analysis of software properties using models, (4) use of models to support runtime adaptation of software (models@runtime), (5) model-based development of software-product lines, and (6) domain-specific modeling languages and metamodeling.