Software is everywhere. It is in planes, cars, children's toys, banks, grocery stores, and is now a fundamental tool in scientific research. Software is an engineered artifact. It is designed to perform specific tasks such as assigning airline seats, navigating an airplane, or searching the worldwide web. Software is often poorly engineered. The task specification for software is often imprecise, and the resulting software designs can be needlessly complex and bloated. When the software itself is buggy, the consequences of these bugs can range from annoying to life-threatening.
The systematic design of correct software is one of the major technical challenges of the 21st century. Working Group 2.3 (http://www.csl.sri.com/users/shankar/IFIP-WG2.3/) of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies (IFIP) has been addressing this challenge for over 30 years. Members of this group have carried out pioneering research in programming languages, structured programming methodologies, system design, program specification and verification, program analysis, and software engineering.
WG2.3 will be conducting a school on "Formal Software Engineering" from Jan 3 to Jan 10, 2002, at TRDDC in Pune, India. The school is co-sponsored by the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology at Macau (http://www.iist.unu.edu), a leading research and education center for formal software engineering. It is hosted by TRDDC, Pune (http://www.pune.tcs.co.in). This 7-day school consists of a course of lectures covering a range of topics in the use of formal calculi and tools in the construction of reliable and well-designed software. These lectures are aimed at post-graduate students, young researchers, and practitioners. The course will introduce the key concepts and summarize the state-of-the-technology in formal software engineering. The lectures will cover topics such as requirements modelling and analysis, logic, specification languages, type systems, program calculi, verification methods, distributed systems, fault tolerance, real-time systems, and hybrid systems. There will be short tool demonstrations. Lecturers at the school include:
We welcome applications from all demonstrably qualified candidates in South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka). There are only a limited number of seats that will be awarded to selected candidates on a first-come-first-served basis. Please email your CV in ASCII format (with full details of your educational, employment background, and at least three references) to ifipschool@cmi.ac.in by Sep 1, 2001. If funds permit, travel and accomodation costs will be subsidised for deserving candidates. The school itself will be free of charge to the participants. More information about the school can be obtained at http://www.csl.sri.com/~shankar/IFIP-WG2.3/school2002.html. Please email your CV in ASCII format to ifipschool@cmi.ac.in by Sep 20, 2001.