Getting your priorities right






In the restrooms of French freeway service stations managed by Total, the soap dispensers partake of pressing advice: The message reads: ONLY ONCE Press for clean hands 1x Total wants to save on costs. Soap is money. Fine. But on the matter of hand-washing one might (perhaps) think, in the current circumstances, of more urgent … Read more




Call for suggestions: beauty






On April 29 in the early evening at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology I will give a talk on “The Beauty of Software”, exploring examples of what makes some concepts, algorithms, data structures etc. produce a sense of esthetics. (Full abstract below.) I gave a first version at TOOLS last year but am revising and … Read more




An annoying practice from another age






When you want to contact academic researchers, particularly computer scientists, you often find their email addresses on their Web pages in a mildly obfuscated form such as “albert dot einstein at princeton dot edu”. If you try to copy-paste such a pseudo-address into an email client so as to fix it there, you often have … Read more




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