29,188 research outputs found
Industrial-Strength Documentation for ACL2
The ACL2 theorem prover is a complex system. Its libraries are vast.
Industrial verification efforts may extend this base with hundreds of thousands
of lines of additional modeling tools, specifications, and proof scripts. High
quality documentation is vital for teams that are working together on projects
of this scale. We have developed XDOC, a flexible, scalable documentation tool
for ACL2 that can incorporate the documentation for ACL2 itself, the Community
Books, and an organization's internal formal verification projects, and which
has many features that help to keep the resulting manuals up to date. Using
this tool, we have produced a comprehensive, publicly available ACL2+Books
Manual that brings better documentation to all ACL2 users. We have also
developed an extended manual for use within Centaur Technology that extends the
public manual to cover Centaur's internal books. We expect that other
organizations using ACL2 will wish to develop similarly extended manuals.Comment: In Proceedings ACL2 2014, arXiv:1406.123
Supervision and Scholarly Writing: Writing to Learn - Learning to Write
This paper describes an action research project on postgraduate studentsā scholarly writing in which I employed reflective approaches to examine and enhance my postgraduate supervisory practice. My reflections on three distinct cycles of supervision illustrate a shift in thinking about scholarly writing and an evolving understanding of how to support postgraduate studentsā writing. These understandings provide the foundation for a future-oriented fourth cycle of supervisory practice, which is characterised by three principles, namely the empowerment of students as writers, the technological context of contemporary writing, and ethical issues in writing
Obtaining Formal Models through Non-Monotonic Refinement
When designing a model for formal verification, we want to\ud
be certain that what we proved about the model also holds for the system we modelled. This raises the question of whether our model represents the system, and what makes us confident about this. By performing so called, non-monotonic refinement in the modelling process, we make the steps and decisions explicit. This helps us to (1) increase the confidence that the model represents the system, (2) structure and organize the communication with domain experts and the problem owner, and (3) identify rational steps made while modelling. We focus on embedded control systems
Proof in Context -- Web Editing with Rich, Modeless Contextual Feedback
The Agora system is a prototypical Wiki for formal mathematics: a web-based
system for collaborating on formal mathematics, intended to support informal
documentation of formal developments. This system requires a reusable proof
editor component, both for collaborative editing of documents, and for
embedding in the resulting documents. This paper describes the design of
Agora's asynchronous editor, that is generic enough to support different tools
working on editor content and providing contextual information, with
interactive theorem proverss being a special, but important, case described in
detail for the Coq theorem prover.Comment: In Proceedings UITP 2012, arXiv:1307.152
Impact of a process improvement program in a production software environment: Are we any better?
For the past 15 years, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has participated in a process improvement program as a member of the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL), which is sponsored by GSFC. The benefits CSC has derived from involvement in this program are analyzed. In the environment studied, it shows that improvements were indeed achieved, as evidenced by a decrease in error rates and costs over a period in which both the size and the complexity of the developed systems increased substantially. The principles and mechanics of the process improvement program, the lessons CSC has learned, and how CSC has capitalized on these lessons are also discussed
Spud 1.0: generalising and automating the user interfaces of scientific computer models
The interfaces by which users specify the scenarios to be simulated by scientific computer models are frequently primitive, under-documented and ad-hoc text files which make using the model in question difficult and error-prone and significantly increase the development cost of the model. In this paper, we present a model-independent system, Spud, which formalises the specification of model input formats in terms of formal grammars. This is combined with an automated graphical user interface which guides users to create valid model inputs based on the grammar provided, and a generic options reading module, libspud, which minimises the development cost of adding model options. <br><br> Together, this provides a user friendly, well documented, self validating user interface which is applicable to a wide range of scientific models and which minimises the developer input required to maintain and extend the model interface
Lab notebooks as scientific communication: investigating development from undergraduate courses to graduate research
In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research
process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has
been paid to addressing what is considered `best practice' for scientific
documentation and how researchers come to learn these practices in experimental
physics. Using interviews with practicing researchers, namely physics graduate
students, we explore the different experiences researchers had in learning how
to effectively use a notebook for scientific documentation. We find that very
few of those interviewed thought that their undergraduate lab classes
successfully taught them the benefit of maintaining a lab notebook. Most
described training in lab notebook use as either ineffective or outright
missing from their undergraduate lab course experience. Furthermore, a large
majority of those interviewed explained that they did not receive any formal
training in maintaining a lab notebook during their graduate school experience
and received little to no feedback from their advisors on these records. Many
of the interviewees describe learning the purpose of, and how to maintain,
these kinds of lab records only after having a period of trial and error,
having already started doing research in their graduate program. Despite the
central role of scientific documentation in the research enterprise, these
physics graduate students did not gain skills in documentation through formal
instruction, but rather through informal hands-on practice.Comment: 10 page
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