SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

The Software Automation, Generation and Administration (SAGA) project is investigating the design and construction of practical software engineering environments for developing and maintaining aerospace systems and applications software. The research includes the practical organization of the software lifecycle, configuration management, software requirements specifications, executable specifications, design methodologies, programming, verification, validation and testing, version control, maintenance, the reuse of software, software libraries, documentation, and automated management

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

Using CLIPS in the domain of knowledge-based massively parallel programming

The Program Development Environment (PDE) is a tool for massively parallel programming of distributed-memory architectures. Adopting a knowledge-based approach, the PDE eliminates the complexity introduced by parallel hardware with distributed memory and offers complete transparency in respect of parallelism exploitation. The knowledge-based part of the PDE is realized in CLIPS. Its principal task is to find an efficient parallel realization of the application specified by the user in a comfortable, abstract, domain-oriented formalism. A large collection of fine-grain parallel algorithmic skeletons, represented as COOL objects in a tree hierarchy, contains the algorithmic knowledge. A hybrid knowledge base with rule modules and procedural parts, encoding expertise about application domain, parallel programming, software engineering, and parallel hardware, enables a high degree of automation in the software development process. In this paper, important aspects of the implementation of the PDE using CLIPS and COOL are shown, including the embedding of CLIPS with C++-based parts of the PDE. The appropriateness of the chosen approach and of the CLIPS language for knowledge-based software engineering are discussed

The 1982 ASEE-NASA Faculty Fellowship program (Aeronautics and Research)

The NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (Aeronautics and Research) conducted at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center during the summer of 1982 is described. Abstracts of the Final Reports submitted by the Fellows detailing the results of their research are also presented

The PARSE Programming Paradigm. Part I: Software Development Methodology. Part II: Software Development Support Tools

The programming methodology of PARSE (parallel software environment), a software environment being developed for reconfigurable non-shared memory parallel computers, is described. This environment will consist of an integrated collection of language interfaces, automatic and semi-automatic debugging and analysis tools, and operating system —all of which are made more flexible by the use of a knowledge-based implementation for the tools that make up PARSE. The programming paradigm supports the user freely choosing among three basic approaches /abstractions for programming a parallel machine: logic-based descriptive, sequential-control procedural, and parallel-control procedural programming. All of these result in efficient parallel execution. The current work discusses the methodology underlying PARSE, whereas the companion paper, “The PARSE Programming Paradigm — II: Software Development Support Tools,” details each of the component tools

A framework for compliant physical interaction : the grasp meets the task

Although the grasp-task interplay in our daily life is unquestionable, very little research has addressed this problem in robotics. In order to fill the gap between the grasp and the task, we adopt the most successful approaches to grasp and task specification, and extend them with additional elements that allow to define a grasp-task link. We propose a global sensor-based framework for the specification and robust control of physical interaction tasks, where the grasp and the task are jointly considered on the basis of the task frame formalism and the knowledge-based approach to grasping. A physical interaction task planner is also presented, based on the new concept of task-oriented hand pre-shapes. The planner focuses on manipulation of articulated parts in home environments, and is able to specify automatically all the elements of a physical interaction task required by the proposed framework. Finally, several applications are described, showing the versatility of the proposed approach, and its suitability for the fast implementation of robust physical interaction tasks in very different robotic systems

Understanding LISP Programs: Towards a Programmer's Apprentice

Work reported herein was conducted at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research program supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and monitored by the Office of Naval Research under Contract Number N00014-70-A-0362-0005.Several attempts have been made to produce tools which will help the programmer of complex computer systems. A new approach is proposed which integrates the programmer's intentions, the program code, and the comments, by relating them to a knowledge base of programming techniques. Our research will extend the work of Sussman, Goldstein, and Hewitt on program description and annotation. A prototype system will be implemented which answers questions and detects bug in simple LISP programs.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

The Implicit Calculus of Constructions as a Programming Language with Dependent Types

International audienceIn this paper, we show how Miquel's Implicit Calculus of Constructions (ICC) can be used as a programming language featuring dependent types. Since this system has an undecidable type-checking, we introduce a more verbose variant, called ICC* which fixes this issue. Datatypes and program specifications are enriched with logical assertions (such as preconditions, postconditions, invariants) and programs are decorated with proofs of those assertions. The point of using ICC* rather than the Calculus of Constructions (the core formalism of the Coq proof assistant) is that all of the static information (types and proof objects) is transparent, in the sense that it does not affect the computational behavior. This is concretized by a built-in extraction procedure that removes this static information. We also illustrate the main features of ICC* on classical examples of dependently typed programs

Program sketching

Sketching is a synthesis methodology that aims to bridge the gap between a programmer’s high-level insights about a problem and the computer’s ability to manage low-level details. In sketching, the programmer uses a partial program, a sketch, to describe the desired implementation strategy, and leaves the low-level details of the implementation to an automated synthesis procedure. In order to generate an implementation from the programmer provided sketch, the synthesizer uses counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS). Inductive synthesis refers to the process of generating candidate implementations from concrete examples of correct or incorrect behavior. CEGIS combines a SAT-based inductive synthesizer with an automated validation procedure, a bounded model-checker, that checks whether the candidate implementation produced by inductive synthesis is indeed correct and to produce new counterexamples. The result is a synthesis procedure that is able to handle complex problems from a variety of domains including ciphers, scientific programs, and even concurrent data-structures