Seminars

For many years the UCL SSE group has run a successful series of seminars, showcasing both mature and developing research from our own researchers and visiting speakers.

The seminars are currently scheduled regularly at 12 on Mondays.

March 2009



• March 9
  Speaker: James Cooper (SUN)
  Title: High Performance Computing: scaling for 2015+
  Abstract: Sun manufactures, designs and implements High Performance Computing systems that scale up to the largest systems in the world using standardised technologies and open-source software. This talk shows Sun's approach and concentrates on one critical component - the parallel file system: Lustre. A parallel file system that scales must implementnovel methods for coping with massive IO rates, vast numbers of clients and servers as well as handling the range of failures that occur regularly in very large hardware deployments. This talk overviews Sun's approach and looks at some of the  methods implemented in the file system to cope with massive scale.
  
  
• March 23
  Speaker: Joel Henry
  Title: TBA Abstract: TBA

February 2009



• February 9
  Speaker: Simon Ritter (SUN)
  Title: What Next For Java: Java SE 7
  Abstract: Java is now a mature language and platform, but it is still evolving This session will look at the plans for the future of Java Standard Edition version 7 and examine the new features that have been proposed for inclusion.  We'll also discuss some of the things that won't be included in Java SE 7 and the rationale for these decisions.
  
  

January 2009



• January 20
  Speaker: Randall B. Smith (SUN)
  Title: Programming the Physical World with the Sun SPOT.
  Abstract: The Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) is a small, battery-powered, wireless device running Java on the bare metal (without an OS). The Sun SPOT includes a 32 bit 188 MHz processor and a "demo sensor board" that hosts a number of sensors and I/O pins for reading and/or controlling external sensors, or driving external devices such as servo motors, speakers, and so forth. The Sun SPOT runs a special Java VM called "Squawk," which was engineered for memory and power constrained devices. Squawk enables multiple applications to execute at once as though each has its own VM, and allows these running applications to migrate live, from one SPOT to another. The presentation will include a few demos including Solarium, a tool which can manage real and locally simulated SPOTs together on the desktop screen. See www.sunspotworld.com for more on the Sun SPOT.
  
  

December 2008



• December 8
  Speaker: Franco Raimondi
  Title: Model checking time, knowledge, correct behaviour, and strategies.
  Abstract: In this talk I will introduce an extension of the traditional temporal-only symbolic model checking procedures to the verification of knowledge, correct behaviour, and strategies. These modalities are often used to express in a natural way requirements of both hardware and software systems. Using a number of examples, I will present the features of a newly released tool to support this kind of analysis, simulations and graphical counter-example generation. (This is a joint work with researchers at Imperial College).
  
  
• December 15
  Speaker: Amitabh Trehan
  Title: The Forgiving Tree: A Self-Healing Distributed Data Structure.
  Abstract TBA
  
  



November 2008



• November 2
  Speaker: Michele Sama
  Title: Model-Based Fault Detection in Context-Aware Adaptive Applications
  Abstract: Applications running on mobile devices are heavily context-aware and adaptive, leading to new analysis and testing challenges as streams of context values drive these applications to undesired configurations that are not easily exposed by existing validation techniques. We address this challenge by employing a finite-state model of adaptive behavior to enable the detection of faults caused by (1) erroneous adaptation logic, and (2) asynchronous updating of context information, which leads to inconsistencies between the external physical context and its internal representation within an application. We identify a number of adaptation fault patterns, each describing a class of faulty behaviors that we detect automatically by analyzing the system's adaptation model. We illustrate our approach on a simple but realistic application in which a cellphone's configuration profile is changed automatically based on the user's location, speed and surrounding environment.
  
  
• November 5
  Speakers: Anthony Finkelstein, Camilo Fitzgerald, Franco Raimondi, Licia Capra, Panagiotis Papakos, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Soo Ling Lim, Valentina Zanardi, Varsha Veerappa
  Abstract: 5-10 minutes presentations.
  
  
• November 17
  Speakers: Aljandra Gonzalez Beltran, Andy Maule, Arun Mukhija, Clovis Champan, Emanuel Letier, Torsten Ackemann
  Abstract: 5-10 minutes presentations.
  
  
• November 24
  Speaker: Iheukwumere Onwuka
  Title: Rethinking evolutionary testing - A black box approach
  Abstract: We challenge the merits of applying evolutionary computation algorithms to automate test data generation for structural testing. In almost all cases, the search for such test data is driven by an evolutionary algorithm optimised on achieving high code coverage. The nadir of this approach lies in the weakness of code coverage as a testing criteria, the irrelevance of code based metrics to system stakeholders and the sub-optimality of a code coverage based approach to bug detection. The few papers that address attempts to apply evolutionary algorithms to functional testing, claim it is difficult to automate. This paper adopts a cross disciplinary approach by infusing evolutionary testing with ideas from software testing practitioners and gives primacy to overarching objective of testing - risk mitigation. We show how rethinking the approach in this way facilitates the straightforward automation of an evolutionary functional test that produces results more relevant to stakeholders than those obtainable from structural based approaches.