Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. His work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980.
In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, analysis, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.
In computer science, communicating sequential processes (CSP) is a formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems. It is a member of the family of mathematical theories of concurrency known as process algebras, or process calculi, based on message passing via channels. CSP was highly influential in the design of the occam programming language and also influenced the design of programming languages such as Limbo, RaftLib, Erlang, Go, Crystal, and Clojure's core.async.
In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
In computer science, model checking or property checking is a method for checking whether a finite-state model of a system meets a given specification. This is typically associated with hardware or software systems, where the specification contains liveness requirements as well as safety requirements.
In software, a spell checker is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.
The Berkeley Lazy Abstraction Software verification Tool (BLAST) is a software model checking tool for C programs. The task addressed by BLAST is the need to check whether software satisfies the behavioral requirements of its associated interfaces. BLAST employs counterexample-driven automatic abstraction refinement to construct an abstract model that is then model-checked for safety properties. The abstraction is constructed on the fly, and only to the requested precision.
SPIN is a general tool for verifying the correctness of concurrent software models in a rigorous and mostly automated fashion. It was written by Gerard J. Holzmann and others in the original Unix group of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, beginning in 1980. The software has been available freely since 1991, and continues to evolve to keep pace with new developments in the field.
Andrew William Roscoe is a Scottish computer scientist. He was Head of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford from 2003 to 2014, and is a Professor of Computer Science. He is also a Fellow of University College, Oxford.
Michael David May FRS FREng is a British computer scientist. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol and founder of XMOS Semiconductor, serving until February 2014 as the chief technology officer.
Michael J. Butler is an Irish computer scientist. As of 2022, he is professor of computer science and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton, England.
In computer science, fault injection is a testing technique for understanding how computing systems behave when stressed in unusual ways. This can be achieved using physical- or software-based means, or using a hybrid approach. Widely studied physical fault injections include the application of high voltages, extreme temperatures and electromagnetic pulses on electronic components, such as computer memory and central processing units. By exposing components to conditions beyond their intended operating limits, computing systems can be coerced into mis-executing instructions and corrupting critical data.
PRISM is a probabilistic model checker, a formal verification software tool for the modelling and analysis of systems that exhibit probabilistic behaviour. One source of such systems is the use of randomization, for example in communication protocols like Bluetooth and FireWire, or in security protocols such as Crowds and Onion routing. Stochastic behaviour also arises in many other computer systems, for example due to equipment failures or unpredictable communication delays. Yet another class of systems amenable to this kind of analysis are biochemical reaction networks.
CADP is a toolbox for the design of communication protocols and distributed systems. CADP is developed by the CONVECS team at INRIA Rhone-Alpes and connected to various complementary tools. CADP is maintained, regularly improved, and used in many industrial projects.
Jim Davies is Professor of Software Engineering and current Director of the Software Engineering Programme at the University of Oxford, England.
CPAchecker is a framework and tool for formal software verification, and program analysis, of C programs. Some of its ideas and concepts, for example lazy abstraction, were inherited from the software model checker BLAST. CPAchecker is based on the idea of configurable program analysis which is a concept that allows expression of both model checking and program analysis with one formalism. When executed, CPAchecker performs a reachability analysis, i.e., it checks whether a certain state, which violates a given specification, can potentially be reached.
Helmut Veith was an Austrian computer scientist who worked on the areas of computer-aided verification, software engineering, computer security, and logic in computer science. He was a Professor of Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria.
Steve Schneider FBCS, CITP is an English computer scientist and Professor of Security. He is Director of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security and Associate Dean at the University of Surrey.
Gavin Lowe is a British academic. He is a professor of computer science and tutorial fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford, a professor at the University of Oxford, and President of the Senior Common Room of St Catherine's College, Oxford. His research interests include computer security, for which he developed the cryptographic protocol analysis tool Casper, and concurrency.
