Synchronous Online Philosophy Courses: An Experiment in Progress

There are two main ways to teach a course online: synchronously or asynchronously. In an asynchronous course, students can log on at their convenience and do the course work. In a synchronous course, there is a requirement that all students be online at specific times, to allow for a shared course environment. In this article, the author discusses the strengths and weaknesses of synchronous online learning for the teaching of undergraduate philosophy courses. The author discusses specific strategies and technologies he uses in the teaching of online philosophy courses. In particular, the author discusses how he uses videoconferencing to create a classroom-like environment in an online class

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Reasoning about order errors in interaction

Reliability of an interactive system depends on users as well as the device implementation. User errors can result in catastrophic system failure. However, work from the field of cognitive science shows that systems can be designed so as to completely eliminate whole classes of user errors. This means that user errors should also fall within the remit of verification methods. In this paper we demonstrate how the HOL theorem prover [7] can be used to detect and prove the absence of the family of errors known as order errors. This is done by taking account of the goals and knowledge of users. We provide an explicit generic user model which embodies theory from the cognitive sciences about the way people are known to act. The user model describes action based on user communication goals. These are goals that a user adopts based on their knowledge of the task they must perform to achieve their goals. We use a simple example of a vending machine to demonstrate the approach. We prove that a user does achieve their goal for a particular design of machine. In doing so we demonstrate that communication goal based errors cannot occur

A Survey of Languages for Specifying Dynamics: A Knowledge Engineering Perspective

A number of formal specification languages for knowledge-based systems has been developed. Characteristics for knowledge-based systems are a complex knowledge base and an inference engine which uses this knowledge to solve a given problem. Specification languages for knowledge-based systems have to cover both aspects. They have to provide the means to specify a complex and large amount of knowledge and they have to provide the means to specify the dynamic reasoning behavior of a knowledge-based system. We focus on the second aspect. For this purpose, we survey existing approaches for specifying dynamic behavior in related areas of research. In fact, we have taken approaches for the specification of information systems (Language for Conceptual Modeling and TROLL), approaches for the specification of database updates and logic programming (Transaction Logic and Dynamic Database Logic) and the generic specification framework of abstract state machine

Mining State-Based Models from Proof Corpora

Interactive theorem provers have been used extensively to reason about various software/hardware systems and mathematical theorems. The key challenge when using an interactive prover is finding a suitable sequence of proof steps that will lead to a successful proof requires a significant amount of human intervention. This paper presents an automated technique that takes as input examples of successful proofs and infers an Extended Finite State Machine as output. This can in turn be used to generate proofs of new conjectures. Our preliminary experiments show that the inferred models are generally accurate (contain few false-positive sequences) and that representing existing proofs in such a way can be very useful when guiding new ones.Comment: To Appear at Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics 201

An Introduction to Mechanized Reasoning

Mechanized reasoning uses computers to verify proofs and to help discover new theorems. Computer scientists have applied mechanized reasoning to economic problems but -- to date -- this work has not yet been properly presented in economics journals. We introduce mechanized reasoning to economists in three ways. First, we introduce mechanized reasoning in general, describing both the techniques and their successful applications. Second, we explain how mechanized reasoning has been applied to economic problems, concentrating on the two domains that have attracted the most attention: social choice theory and auction theory. Finally, we present a detailed example of mechanized reasoning in practice by means of a proof of Vickrey's familiar theorem on second-price auctions