Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

On April 11 I gave the “Ershov lecture” in Novosibirsk. I talked about concurrency; a video recording is available here.

The lecture is given annually in memory of Andrey P. Ershov, one of the founding fathers of Russian computer science and originator of many important concepts such as partial evaluation. According to Wikipedia, Knuth considers Ershov to be the inventor of hashing. I was fortunate to make Ershov’s acquaintance in the late seventies and to meet him regularly afterwards. He invited me to his institute in Novosibirsk for a two-month stay where I learned a lot. He had a warm, caring personality, and set many young computer scientists in their tracks. His premature death in 1988 was a shock to all and his memory continues to be revered; it was gratifying to be able to give the lecture named in his honor.

I am giving my “inaugural lecture” at ITMO in Saint Petersburg tomorrow (Thursday, 28 February 2013) at 14 (2 PM) local time, meaning e.g. 11 AM in Western Europe and 2 AM (ouch!) in California. See here for the announcement. The title is “Programming: Magic, Art, Routine or Science?“. The talk will be streamed live: see here.

On Thursday, July 5 at 15 Saint Petersburg time (7 AM New York, noon London, 13 Paris/Brussels/Zurich/Milan), the Saint Petersburg software engineering seminar presents two talks, streamed over the Internet:

• Firat hour:  Luciano Baresi, Politecnico di Milano: A-3: A Middleware for Self-organizing Pervasive Systems
• Second hour: Harald Gall, University of Zurich: Software Assessment with Software Sensing and Bug Smelling

See abstracts and other details on the <a href=”http://sel.ifmo.ru/seminar/” target=”blog_illustrations”><span style=”color: #0000ff; text-decoration: underline;”>seminar page</span></a>.

The seminar will be streamed over the Internet at the usual address: <a href=”Software Assessment with Software Sensing and Bug Smelling” target=”blog_illustrations”><span style=”color: #0000ff; text-decoration: underline;”>Software Assessment with Software Sensing and Bug Smelling</span></a>. Please join us for two exciting presentations!

In  last Thursday’s session of the seminar, Kokichi Futatsugi’s talk took longer than planned (and it would have been a pity to stop him), so I postponed my own talk on Automatic inference of frame conditions through the alias calculus to next week (Thursday local date). As usual it will be broadcast live.

Seminar page: here, including the link to follow the webcast.

Time and date: 5 April 2012, 18 Saint Petersburg time; you can see the local time at your location here.

Abstract:

Frame specifications, the description of what does not change in a routine call, are one of the most annoying components of verification, in particular for object-oriented software. Ideally frame conditions should be inferred automatically. I will present how the alias calculus, described in recent papers, can address this need.

There may be a second talk, on hybrid systems, by Sergey Velder.

The Saint Petersburg software engineering seminar has two sessions today (29 March 2012, 18 local time, see here for the date and time in your area), broadcast live:

• By Kokichi Futatsugi from KAIST (Japan): Combining Inference and Search in Verification with CafeOBJ.
• By me: Automatic inference of frame conditions through the alias calculus.

See details including the link for the live webcast on the seminar page. The page also includes links to video recordings of recent sessions.