Software Engineering at Oxford

Advances in microsensor technology as well as the development of miniaturized computing platforms enable us to scatter numerous untethered sensing devices in hard to reach terrains, and continuously collect geospatial information in never before seen spatial and temporal scales. Sensor networks deployed in geographic space to detect, monitor and track environmental phenomena are called geosensor networks. Geosensor network technologies are revolutionizing the way that geospatial information is collected, analyzed and integrated with existing large-scale sensor platforms and historical data, with the geospatial content of the information being of fundamental importance. Analysis and event detection in a geosensor network is performed in real-time within the network.
In this talk, I will present some of our current research work in the Geosensor Networks Lab at the University of Maine with regard to monitoring and tracking continuous phenomena using geosensor networks as well as in-network spatial window query estimation. Another one of our application areas is intelligent transportation and ad-hoc decision making in dynamic mobile geosensor networks as well as ocean drifter networks for red tide detection.

Jeremy Gibbons, Abstract Datatypes: The Phantom Menace

Last term, Ralf Hinze gave a seminar on Abstract Datatypes and Unique Fixpoints. In this talk I will try to fill in some of the background to that presentation. In particular, I will explain why "abstract datatypes have existential type", why this leads to a problem with reasoning, and what to do about that problem.

Richard Kirk (Fortify), Fortify 360

Fortify is a software security company that delivers products and services to protect companies from the threats posed by security flaws in business-critical software applications. Fortify 360 is a product suite that integrates static source code analysis, dynamic runtime analysis, and real-time monitoring to identify critical security vulnerabilities in software applications. In this presentation, Richard Kirk, VP at Fortify, will describe the challenges of building secure software and will demonstrate the principal features of Fortify 360 that are designed to help software developers detect and repair security vulnerabilities during the software development lifecycle.

Ana de Melo, Using Formal Verification to Reduce Test Space of Fault-tolerant Programs

Testing object-oriented programs is still a hard task, despite many studies on criteria to better cover the test space. Test criteria establish requirements one want to achieve in testing programs to help in finding software defects. On the other hand, program verification guarantees that a program preserves its specification but its application is not very straightforward in many cases. Both program testing and verification are expensive tasks and could be used to complement each other.
We present a new approach to automate and integrate testing and program verification for fault-tolerant systems. In this approach we show how to assess information from programs verification in order to reduce the test space regarding exceptions definition/use testing criteria. As properties on exception-handling mechanisms are checked using a model checker (Java PathFinder), programs are traced. Information from these traces can be used to realize how much testing criteria have been covered, reducing the further program test space.

TBA, TBA

Charles Crichton, TBA

Anthony Masih, TBA

Peter Darch, TBA

Jackie Wang, TBA

Joe Loughry, TBA

Seminars

Michaelmas Term 2008

Contact

Previous terms

Abstracts