Related papers: Teaching Formal Methods and Discrete Mathematics

For many decades, formal methods are considered to be the way forward to help the software industry to make more reliable and trustworthy software. However, despite this strong belief and many individual success stories, no real change in…

Formal methods provide systematic and rigorous techniques for software development. We strongly believe that they must be taught in computer science curricula. In this paper we present the pedagogic rationale and the concrete implementation…

Formal methods for software correctness are critical to the future of software engineering - and so must be an essential part of software engineering education. Unfortunately, formal methods are often resisted by students due to perceived…

Formal methods refer to rigorous, mathematical approaches to system development and have played a key role in establishing the correctness of safety-critical systems. The main building blocks of formal methods are models and specifications,…

Discrete mathematics is the foundation of computer science. It focuses on concepts and reasoning methods that are studied using math notations. It has long been argued that discrete math is better taught with programming, which takes…

Real-life conjectures do not come with instructions saying whether they they should be proven or, instead, refuted. Yet, as we now know, in either case the final argument produced had better be not just convincing but actually verifiable in…

Formal verification of software is a bit of a niche activity: it is only applied to the most safety-critical or security-critical software and it is typically only performed by specialized verification engineers. This paper considers…

Increased demands in the field of scientific computation require that algorithms be more efficiently implemented. Maintaining correctness in addition to efficiency is a challenge that software engineers in the field have to face. In this…

An introductory formal languages course exposes advanced undergraduate and early graduate students to automata theory, grammars, constructive proofs, computability, and decidability. Programming students find these topics to be challenging…

This white paper argues that formal methods need to be better rooted in higher education curricula for computer science and software engineering programmes of study. To this end, it advocates (i) improved teaching of formal methods; (ii)…

There are many benefits in providing formal specifications for our software. However, teaching students to do this is not always easy as courses on formal methods are often experienced as dry by students. This paper presents a game called…

Formal mathematics is mathematics done within the framework of a formal logic. It offers major benefits to mathematicians as well as to computing professionals, engineers, and scientists who use mathematics in their work. The standard…

The quality of software produced by students is often poor. How to teach students to develop good quality software has long been a topic in computer science education and research. We must conclude that we still do not have a good answer to…

Context: Formal methods (FMs) have been around for a while, still being unclear how to leverage their benefits, overcome their challenges, and set new directions for their improvement towards a more successful transfer into practice.…

In order to work with mathematical content in computer systems, it is necessary to represent it in formal languages. Ideally, these are supported by tools that verify the correctness of the content, allow computing with it, and produce…

Decentralized systems have been widely developed and applied to address security and privacy issues in centralized systems, especially since the advancement of distributed ledger technology. However, it is challenging to ensure their…

Formal methods yet advantageous, face challenges towards wide acceptance and adoption in software development practices. The major reason being presumed complexity. The issue can be addressed by academia with a thoughtful plan of teaching…

Formal methods were frequently shown to be effective and, perhaps because of that, practitioners are interested in using them more often. Still, these methods are far less applied than expected, particularly, in critical domains where they…

The ForMaRE project applies formal mathematical reasoning to economics. We seek to increase confidence in economics' theoretical results, to aid in discovering new results, and to foster interest in formal methods, i.e. computer-aided…

Continuous models used in physics and other areas of mathematics applications become discrete when they are computerized, e.g., utilized for computations. Besides, computers are controlling processes in discrete spaces, such as films and…