Informatics Research Institute (IRIS) March 2009 newsletter

This is the first newsletter following the outcome of the Research Assessment Exercise which confirmed IRIS as one of the leading multidisciplinary research institutes that brings together expertise in social, technological and computational aspects of information systems. Research Fortnight ranked IRIS activities in the top two submissions in the country, with 75% of activities at international level and 25% at world leading level. The reviewers were particularly impressed with the Research Environment, which was highlighted as having 50% of activities at world leading level. I’d like to thank all members of IRIS whose commitment to pursuing high quality research has contributed to this success. This newsletter highlights some activities immediately following the RAE, showing that we are not content with the excellent RAE results but building further on our successful research. It includes examples of important research events that we are organising, publications in major outlets, funded projects and students who have successfully completed their PhDs

Informatics Research Institute (IRIS) September 2008 newsletter

2007-8 was a very busy year for IRIS. It was a bumper year for visiting Profs with Prof Michael Myers visiting from New Zealand, Prof Brian Fitzgerald visiting from University of Limerick, Ireland, Prof. Uzay Kaymak visiting from Erasmus University Netherlands and Prof Steve Sawyer visiting from Pennsylvania State University, USA. Their visits enriched our doctoral school, seminar programme workshops and our research. We were very lucky to have such a distinguished line up of visiting professors and we offer them hearty thanks and hope to keep ongoing research links with them

Proof by analogy in mural

One of the most important advantages of using a formal method of developing software is that one can prove that development steps are correct with respect to their specification. Conducting proofs by hand, however,can be time consuming to the extent that designers have to judge whether a proof of a particular obligation is worth conducting. Even if hand proofs are worth conducting, how do we know that they are correct? One approach to overcoming this problem is to use an automatic theorem proving system to develop and check our proofs. However, in order to enable present day theorem provers to check proofs, one has to conduct them in much more detail than hand proofs. Carrying out more detailed proofs is of course more time consuming. This paper describes the use of proof by analogy in an attempt to reduce the time spent on proofs. We develop and implement a proof follower based on analogy and present two examples to illustrate its characteristics. One example illustrates the successful use of the proof follower. The other example illustrates that the follower's failure can provide a hint that enables the user to complete a proof

Tools for producing formal specifications : a view of current architectures and future directions

During the last decade, one important contribution towards requirements engineering has been the advent of formal specification languages. They offer a well-defined notation that can improve consistency and avoid ambiguity in specifications. However, the process of obtaining formal specifications that are consistent with the requirements is itself a difficult activity. Hence various researchers are developing systems that aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The kind of problems tackled and the contributions made by these proposed systems are very diverse. This paper brings these studies together to provide a vision for future architectures that aim to aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The new architecture, which is based on the strengths of existing studies, tackles a number of key issues in requirements engineering such as identifying ambiguities, incompleteness, and reusability. The paper concludes with a discussion of the research problems that need to be addressed in order to realise the proposed architecture

AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends

The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested