200 research outputs found
Guided Unfoldings for Finding Loops in Standard Term Rewriting
In this paper, we reconsider the unfolding-based technique that we have
introduced previously for detecting loops in standard term rewriting. We
improve it by guiding the unfolding process, using distinguished positions in
the rewrite rules. This results in a depth-first computation of the unfoldings,
whereas the original technique was breadth-first. We have implemented this new
approach in our tool NTI and compared it to the previous one on a bunch of
rewrite systems. The results we get are promising (better times, more
successful proofs).Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 28th International Symposium
on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2018), Frankfurt
am Main, Germany, 4-6 September 2018 (arXiv:1808.03326
Specifying Reusable Components
Reusable software components need expressive specifications. This paper
outlines a rigorous foundation to model-based contracts, a method to equip
classes with strong contracts that support accurate design, implementation, and
formal verification of reusable components. Model-based contracts
conservatively extend the classic Design by Contract with a notion of model,
which underpins the precise definitions of such concepts as abstract
equivalence and specification completeness. Experiments applying model-based
contracts to libraries of data structures suggest that the method enables
accurate specification of practical software
Loops under Strategies ... Continued
While there are many approaches for automatically proving termination of term
rewrite systems, up to now there exist only few techniques to disprove their
termination automatically. Almost all of these techniques try to find loops,
where the existence of a loop implies non-termination of the rewrite system.
However, most programming languages use specific evaluation strategies, whereas
loop detection techniques usually do not take strategies into account. So even
if a rewrite system has a loop, it may still be terminating under certain
strategies.
Therefore, our goal is to develop decision procedures which can determine
whether a given loop is also a loop under the respective evaluation strategy.
In earlier work, such procedures were presented for the strategies of
innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive evaluation. In the current paper,
we build upon this work and develop such decision procedures for important
strategies like leftmost-innermost, leftmost-outermost,
(max-)parallel-innermost, (max-)parallel-outermost, and forbidden patterns
(which generalize innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive strategies). In
this way, we obtain the first approach to disprove termination under these
strategies automatically.Comment: In Proceedings IWS 2010, arXiv:1012.533
Motif Discovery in Physiological Datasets: A Methodology for Inferring Predictive Elements
In this article, we propose a methodology for identifying predictive physiological patterns in the absence of prior knowledge. We use the principle of conservation to identify activity that consistently precedes an outcome in patients, and describe a two-stage process that allows us to efficiently search for such patterns in large datasets. This involves first transforming continuous physiological signals from patients into symbolic sequences, and then searching for patterns in these reduced representations that are strongly associated with an outcome.
Our strategy of identifying conserved activity that is unlikely to have occurred purely by chance in symbolic data is analogous to the discovery of regulatory motifs in genomic datasets. We build upon existing work in this area, generalizing the notion of a regulatory motif and enhancing current techniques to operate robustly on non-genomic data. We also address two significant considerations associated with motif discovery in general: computational efficiency and robustness in the presence of degeneracy and noise. To deal with these issues, we introduce the concept of active regions and new subset-based techniques such as a two-layer Gibbs sampling algorithm. These extensions allow for a framework for information inference, where precursors are identified as approximately conserved activity of arbitrary complexity preceding multiple occurrences of an event.
We evaluated our solution on a population of patients who experienced sudden cardiac death and attempted to discover electrocardiographic activity that may be associated with the endpoint of death. To assess the predictive patterns discovered, we compared likelihood scores for motifs in the sudden death population against control populations of normal individuals and those with non-fatal supraventricular arrhythmias. Our results suggest that predictive motif discovery may be able to identify clinically relevant information even in the absence of significant prior knowledge.CIMIT: Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative TechnologyHarvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technolog
A theory of normed simulations
In existing simulation proof techniques, a single step in a lower-level
specification may be simulated by an extended execution fragment in a
higher-level one. As a result, it is cumbersome to mechanize these techniques
using general purpose theorem provers. Moreover, it is undecidable whether a
given relation is a simulation, even if tautology checking is decidable for the
underlying specification logic. This paper introduces various types of normed
simulations. In a normed simulation, each step in a lower-level specification
can be simulated by at most one step in the higher-level one, for any related
pair of states. In earlier work we demonstrated that normed simulations are
quite useful as a vehicle for the formalization of refinement proofs via
theorem provers. Here we show that normed simulations also have pleasant
theoretical properties: (1) under some reasonable assumptions, it is decidable
whether a given relation is a normed forward simulation, provided tautology
checking is decidable for the underlying logic; (2) at the semantic level,
normed forward and backward simulations together form a complete proof method
for establishing behavior inclusion, provided that the higher-level
specification has finite invisible nondeterminism.Comment: 31 pages, 10figure
A reification calculus for model-oriented software specification
This paper presents a transformational approach to the derivation of
implementations from model-oriented specifications of abstract data types.
The purpose of this research is to reduce the number of formal proofs required
in model refinement, which hinder software development. It is shown to be appli-
cable to the transformation of models written in Meta-iv (the specification lan-
guage of Vdm) towards their refinement into, for example, Pascal or relational
DBMSs. The approach includes the automatic synthesis of retrieve functions
between models, and data-type invariants.
The underlying algebraic semantics is the so-called final semantics “`a la Wand”:
a specification “is” a model (heterogeneous algebra) which is the final ob ject (up
to isomorphism) in the category of all its implementations.
The transformational calculus approached in this paper follows from exploring
the properties of finite, recursively defined sets.
This work extends the well-known strategy of program transformation to model
transformation, adding to previous work on a transformational style for operation-
decomposition in META-IV. The model-calculus is also useful for improving
model-oriented specifications.(undefined
Return of the Great Spaghetti Monster : Learnings from a Twelve-Year Adventure in Web Software Development
The widespread adoption of the World Wide Web has fundamentally changed the landscape of software development. Only ten years ago, very few developers would write software for the Web, let alone consider using JavaScript or other web technologies for writing any serious software applications. In this paper, we reflect upon a twelve-year adventure in web development that began with the development of the Lively Kernel system at Sun Microsystems Labs in 2006. Back then, we also published some papers that identified important challenges in web-based software development based on established software engineering principles. We will revisit our earlier findings and compare the state of the art in web development today to our earlier learnings, followed by some reflections and suggestions for the road forward.Peer reviewe
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