Der Fachbereich Informatik und die Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft
laden zu folgendem Vortrag ein:
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Professor Cliff B. Jones
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Datum:   Montag, 27. Oktober 2003
Uhrzeit: 17.00 Uhr pünktlich
Ort:     Hörsaal EI 9 (Hlawka-Hs), TU Wien, Gußhausstr. 27-29, Erdgeschoss

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TITEL:
The Early Search for Tractable Ways of Reasoning about Programs
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ABSTRACT:
This paper traces the important steps in the history -up to around 1990- of
research on reasoning about programs. The main focus is on sequential
imperative programs but some comments are made on concurrency. Initially,
researchers focussed on ways of verifying that a program satisfies its
specification (or that two programs were equivalent). Over time it became
clear that post facto verification is only practical for small programs and
attention turned to verification methods which support the development of
programs; for larger programs it is necessary to exploit a notation of
compositionality. Coping with concurrent algorithms is much more
challenging - this and other extensions are considered briefly. The main
thesis of this paper is that the idea of reasoning about programs has been
around since they were first written; the search has been to find tractable
methods.

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Kurzbiographie zu Professor ***
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Cliff Jones is one of the Professors of Computing Science at Newcastle.
Within the School of Computing Science he acts as Research Director.
Currently his own major research project is the five university IRC on
"Dependability of Computer-Based Systems" of which he is overall Project
Director.
Cliff has actually spent more of his career in industry than academia.
Fifteen years in IBM saw among other things the creation with colleagues in
Vienna of VDM which is one of the better known "formal methods". After that
time he received a (late) Doctorate under Tony Hoare in Oxford in 1981 and
immediately moved to a chair at Manchester University where he built a
strong Formal Methods group which -among other projects- was the academic
partner in the largest Alvey Software Engineering project (IPSE 2.5 created
the "mural" theorem proving assistant). During his time at Manchester,
Cliff had a 5-year "Senior Fellowship" and spent a sabbatical at Cambridge
with the Newton Institute event on "Semantics". Much of his research at
this time focused on formal (compositional) development methods for
concurrent systems.
In 1996 he moved to Harlequin, directing some 50 developers on Information
Management projects and finally became overall Technical Director before
leaving to re-join academia in 1999.
Cliff's interests in formal methods have now broadened to reflect wider
issues of dependability. Cliff is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of
Engineering (FREng), ACM, BCS, and IEE.

Weitere Informationen über den Vortragenden finden Sie auf
http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/home.php?name=cliff.jones
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Kontaktperson an der TU Wien: Prof. Dr. Mehdi Jazayeri, Tel. 58801-18410

Die Finanzierung dieser Veranstaltung erfolgt durch
das Institut für Informationssysteme und die TU Wien.
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Der Fachbereich Informatik erhält Sponsorgelder u.a. von
      - Austrian Research Center Seibersdorf
      - Siemens AG Österreich
      - Caramba Labs Software AG
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