Two talks by Gilles Brassard in Zurich and Schaffhausen, this Wednesday






Gilles Brassard, quantum cryptography pioneer (among other achievements), will give two talks this Wednesday (22.01): One at the University of Zurich, at 11:15 (session start at 10:30) on “The Art of Secret Communication in a Quantum World””. The other at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology at 18:30 (session start at 17:30, talks followed by Apéro) … Read more




Talk on requirements at UC Santa Barbara tomorrow






I am giving a “distinguished lecture” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, January 10 (Friday, tomorrow) at 14. The title is A Comprehensive Approach to Requirements Engineering. The abstract and rest of the information are here. I will spend the last few minutes of the talk discussing other current developments (verification, concurrency).




This Wednesday in Nice: survey talk on the Eiffel method






The “Morgenstern Colloquium” at the University of Nice / INRIA Sophia Antipolis invited me to give a talk, next Wednesday (18 December) at 11 in Sophia Antipolis, in the aptly named* “Kahn Building”. The announcement appears here. I proposed various topics but (pleasant surprise) the organizers explicitly asked me to lecture about what I really … Read more




Defining and classifying requirements (new publication)






Software engineering has improved a lot in the past couple of decades, but there remains an area where the old doomsday style of starting a software engineering paper (software crisis, everything is rotten…) still fits: requirements engineering. Just see the chasm between textbook advice and the practice of most projects. I have written on requirements … Read more




What happened to the kilogram? Schaffhausen, 16 December






December 16 (next Monday), the newly created Schaffhausen Institute of Technology organizes an entire day of events around three (no less) talks by the physics Nobel prize winner and MIT professor Wolfgang Ketterle. The culmination of the day is a talk by Prof. Ketterle in the evening on “What happened to the kilogram?”. From the … Read more




Are my requirements complete?






Some important concepts of software engineering, established over the years, are not widely known in the community. One use of this blog is to provide tutorials on such overlooked ideas. An earlier article covered one pertaining to project management: the Shortest Possible Schedule property . Here is another, this time in the area of requirements engineering, … Read more




Adult entertainment






Sign seen in a Singapore shopping center:   Let us make sure we understand: here children are not allowed, but playing is. As a consequence such playing must be performed by non-children only. Adults welcome to play! Maybe it is actually not the intended meaning.  Instead of (and (not (allowed children)) (allowed playing)) the desired … Read more




June LASER school, Elba, on Devops, Microservices…






The 2020 LASER summer school has been announced. It will take place June 1 to 6* , as always in Elba Island, this year with the theme DevOps, Microservices and Software Development for the Age of the Web. The first five speakers are listed on the conference page, with more to come, from both academia … Read more




Those were the days






Earlier this year I was in Sofia for a conference, at the main university (Saint Kliment) which in the entrance hall had an exhibition about its history. There was this student poster and song from I think around 1900:   I like the banner (what do you think?). It even has the correct Latin noun … Read more