Property-Based Testing - The ProTest Project

The ProTest project is an FP7 STREP on property based testing. The purpose of the project is to develop software engineering approaches to improve reliability of service-oriented networks; support fault-finding and diagnosis based on specified properties of the system. And to do so we will build automated tools that will generate and run tests, monitor execution at run-time, and log events for analysis. The Erlang / Open Telecom Platform has been chosen as our initial implementation vehicle due to its robustness and reliability within the telecoms sector. It is noted for its success in the ATM telecoms switches by Ericsson, one of the project partners, as well as for multiple other uses such as in facebook, yahoo etc. In this paper we provide an overview of the project goals, as well as detailing initial progress in developing property based testing techniques and tools for the concurrent functional programming language Erlang

Drawn towards (an exhibition of drawings)

An exhibition of graphic work by Simon Read: My proposal for the exhibition at the Cut Gallery is that, rather than show a selection of studio work, I would focus primarily on drawing and more specifically upon drawing that is used as a means of exploring ideas and even more specifically laying stress upon work that has been carried out within this region. My decision to do this was not just a matter of accessibility, but more to use it as a platform for how an artist can use work directly as a vehicle for exploration and engaging with contemporary issues, such as environmental change. Over the last ten years I have increasingly sought ways in which I can actively contribute to this debate. Being based upon the Suffolk Coast in daily contact with a changing estuary landscape, means that I have a privileged insight, which I now feel that I can articulate through my relationship with the local community. Now I find myself operating on many levels, my public role has expanded to put me on more committees than I would have initially imagined and I am energetically exploring ways that I can establish interdisciplinary collaborations in an academic context. It is always difficult to square this kind of involvement with the autonomy of an artist's practice. This is something that I cannot claim to have an answer for but have the conviction that, if pursued, it is bound to make sense. To this end I have suggested that, rather than a finite show of work, this exhibition should be taken in the spirit of an open question. (This text is a transcription from The Cut Arts Centre Spring diary of events for 2010

Acceptability with general orderings

We present a new approach to termination analysis of logic programs. The essence of the approach is that we make use of general orderings (instead of level mappings), like it is done in transformational approaches to logic program termination analysis, but we apply these orderings directly to the logic program and not to the term-rewrite system obtained through some transformation. We define some variants of acceptability, based on general orderings, and show how they are equivalent to LD-termination. We develop a demand driven, constraint-based approach to verify these acceptability-variants. The advantage of the approach over standard acceptability is that in some cases, where complex level mappings are needed, fairly simple orderings may be easily generated. The advantage over transformational approaches is that it avoids the transformation step all together. {\bf Keywords:} termination analysis, acceptability, orderings.Comment: To appear in "Computational Logic: From Logic Programming into the Future

RELEASE: A High-level Paradigm for Reliable Large-scale Server Software

Erlang is a functional language with a much-emulated model for building reliable distributed systems. This paper outlines the RELEASE project, and describes the progress in the first six months. The project aim is to scale the Erlang’s radical concurrency-oriented programming paradigm to build reliable general-purpose software, such as server-based systems, on massively parallel machines. Currently Erlang has inherently scalable computation and reliability models, but in practice scalability is constrained by aspects of the language and virtual machine. We are working at three levels to address these challenges: evolving the Erlang virtual machine so that it can work effectively on large scale multicore systems; evolving the language to Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang; developing a scalable Erlang infrastructure to integrate multiple, heterogeneous clusters. We are also developing state of the art tools that allow programmers to understand the behaviour of massively parallel SD Erlang programs. We will demonstrate the effectiveness of the RELEASE approach using demonstrators and two large case studies on a Blue Gene

Ambitions of a global city: Arts, culture and creative economy in 'Post-Crisis' Singapore

10.1080/10286632.2011.639876International Journal of Cultural Policy183279-29