Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Newsletter

Issue 9 - 19th December 1994

Editor - Hugh Glaser

Editorial

And a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our readers.

Today's Seminar

The DSSE talk on Monday the 19th December at 12:30 will be given by Christopher Pratten.

Experiences of the Use of Formal Methods at IBM Hursley

IBM has been experimenting with the use of Formal Methods for some time now. In particular, they have made use of the Z notation to specify both new and existing sytems. More recently, they have attempted to add greater formality to the process of code developement from formal specification by using the Abstract Machine Notation and the B Toolkit. I am sponsored by IBM and have spent some time at Hursley. I will talk about my experiences of IBM's uses of formal methods and (if time allows) the relationship with my work.

VIM Project Barcelona Meeting - Hugh Glaser

15th December 1994

Tutorial: The Icslas Language

Christian Queinnec talking about models of causality and distribution, and explaining timestamping data to provide non-sequentialisable memory, lazy invalidation...
Two papers are available, dissem and lcc.

Tutorial: Communication Models

Dave De Roure talking about formal tools and engineering the above. First about HOC, then about distributed machine architecture.

Tutorial: An Introduction to PVM

Duncan Batey gave a one day talk in half an hour.

Tutorial: Distributed GC and process migration

Julian Padget talking about weak pointers (Christian's et al. work).

Tutorial: World Wide Web

Dave De Roure with one slide on the Web.

WWW, KQML, and software agents

Walter van de Velde talking about

Scripts and things
Network-based Robots, eg doing network searches
Agents (eg prioritising email) Learns
Multiple agents, KIF (Knowledge Interface Format)
KQML (Knowledge Query Meta Language)
Moving agents, Tele Scripts

Discussion: How might we collaborate?

Dave De Roure

EuLisp as an Object-Oriented (Distributed?) Scripting Language
Towards VIM project standards for Lisp code and data interchange over the internet: XDR and MIME
Event Driven Interpreters

Paper Review: Overcoming the Tyranny of the Event Loop by Matthew Fuchs

Giuseppe Attardi discussing his understanding of this paper.

Presentation: Communication and data mapping in Paralation model

Maurizio Giordano discussing discussing data allocation stategies and the results of execution on their Paralation system.

FPIV Suggestion: DYMOS Environment Simulation

Angela Sodan introduced a group which might provide an application area for VIM-type technology.

Social Event: Dinner at the Olympic Harbour

A late night.

Software agents as a means for coordination

Walter van de Velde talking more about agents and scripts, especially TeleScript.

Presentation: Zeno project on computational dialectics

Tom Gordon talking about mediating group decision-making, and his system which gives an instance of the model.

Presentation: VIM Research at Salerno

Vincenzo Loia talking about Classification-based Systems, Actor-based models Distributed Diagnostic Systems and Antonina Dattolo talking about Distributed Hypertext systems.

Discussion: Proposals for FPIV

Moderated by Giuseppe Attardi

Management Meeting

Copy deadline: 5pm Friday for Monday's newsletter, but send the articles any time.

Hugh Glaser
Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Group
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton