The 20^th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods

Sir Tony Hoare (C. A. R. Hoare) is a British computer scientist. He developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959/1960. He also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness in 1969, and the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes in 1985. He received the Turing Prize and the Kyoto Prize for his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages in 1980 and 2000 respectively. Tony Hoare became a professor at Oxford University in 1977 where he is now an Emeritus Professor. Hoare was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. A recent personal research goal has been the unification of a diverse range of theories applying to different programming languages, paradigms, and implementation technologies. Tony has been and continue to be an inspiration to many researchers.

Title: Algebra, Logic, Geometry at the Foundation of Computer Science

Abstract: I look forward to the day when a Unified Theory of Programming will be generally taught throughout a Degree Course in Computing. It will tell students a simple method for planning, developing and testing their practical exercises and assignments. The initial level of mathematical presentation of the Theory is that of High School lessons in Algebra, Logic and Geometry. The Theory will be put to immediate practical use by a Software Development Environment for students, providing guidance and immediate checking for the programs which they write.

Slides: Download here

David Basin is a full professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1989 and his Habilitation in Computer Science from the University of Saarbrucken in 1996. From 1997–2002 he held the chair of Software Engineering at the University of Freiburg in Germany. His research areas are Information Security and Software Engineering. He is the founding director of the ZISC, the Zurich Information Security Center, which he led from 2003-2011. He is Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security and of Springer-Verlag's book series on Information Security and Cryptography. He serves on various management and scientific advisory boards, co-founded three security companies, and has consulted extensively for IT companies and government organizations.

Title: Security Protocols: Model Checking Standards

Abstract: The design of security protocols is typically approached more as an art than a science, and often with disastrous consequences. But this need not be so! I have been working for ca. 20 years on foundations, methods, and tools, both for developing protocols that are correct by construction and for the post-hoc verification of existing designs. In this talk I will introduce my work in this area and describe my experience analyzing, improving, and contributing to different industry standards, both existing and upcoming.

Professor Ian Hayes is a professor of computer science at the University of Queensland. His research interests are in formal methods for software development, in particular, for concurrent and real-time systems, and for language-based software security. His most recent concurrency research has been on the development of a concurrent program algebra to support reasoning about concurrency using the rely/guarantee approach and incorporating fairness and progress assumptions. His recent research in language-based security has focussed on providing secure access to resources via capabilities.

Title: Progress towards an algebra for concurrent programs

Abstract: Our original goal was to develop a refinement calculus for shared-memory concurrent programs that would support Jones-style rely/guarantee developments. Our semantics was based on Aczel traces, which explicitly include environment steps as well as program steps, and were originally proposed as a basis for showing the rely/guarantee rules of Jones are sound. Where we have ended up is with a hierarchy of algebraic theories that provide a foundation for concurrent program refinement, which allows us to prove Jones-style rely/guarantee laws, as well as new laws. In particular, we are able to encode fairness in a novel way that allows fair execution of a single process to be treated in isolation, rather than fairness being encoded intrinsically in a fair parallel operator. We also have a new way of looking at progress assumptions for blocking operations. Our algebraic theory is based on a lattice of commands that includes a sub-lattice of test commands (similar to Kozen's Kleene Algebra with Tests) and a sub-algebra of atomic step commands (similar to Milner's SCCS) but with a richer structure that supports Aczel's program and environment steps as atomic step commands. The latter allows us to directly encode rely and guarantee commands to represent rely/guarantee specifications, and to encode fair execution of a command.

Prof. Zhenjiang Hu is a professor of both National Institute of Informatics and University of Tokyo. He received his BS and MS degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1988 and 1991, respectively, and PhD degree from University of Tokyo in 1996. His main interest is in programming languages and software engineering in general, and functional programming, program transformation, and bidirectional programming in particular. Zhenjiang Hu is the steering committee chair of the NII Shonan Meetings, an IEEE Technical & Conference Activities Board member, and an IFIP WG 2.1 member. He is (was) also serving on the editorial board members of IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering, Science of Computer Programming, and Software and Systems Modeling.

Title: On Verification of Bidirectional Transformations

Abstract: Bidirectional transformations play an important role in data synchronization, data integration, and smart system construction. A bidirectional transformation consists of a pair of transformations --- a forward transformation produces a target view from a source, while a putback transformation puts back modifications on the view to the source --- satisfying the roundtrip property. In this talk, I will discuss the issues and report some results on automatic verification of the roundtrip and the view updatability properties of bidirectional transformations.