Related papers: What Causes a System to Satisfy a Specification?
Regulatory compliance is increasingly being addressed in the practice of requirements engineering as a main stream concern. This paper points out a gap in the theoretical foundations of regulatory compliance, and presents a theory that…
Accountability aims to provide explanations for why unwanted situations occurred, thus providing means to assign responsibility and liability. As such, accountability has slightly different meanings across the sciences. In computer science,…
Halpern and Pearl introduced a definition of actual causality; Eiter and Lukasiewicz showed that computing whether X=x is a cause of Y=y is NP-complete in binary models (where all variables can take on only two values) and\…
The growing complexity of software systems and the influence of software-supported decisions in our society awoke the need for software that is transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. Explainability has been identified as a means to…
Our lives become increasingly dependent on safety- and security-critical systems, so formal techniques are advocated for engineering such systems. One of such techniques is validation obligations that enable formalizing requirements early…
An approach is introduced, which supports a testing technician in the identification of possibly untested behavior of control software of fully integrated automated production systems (aPS). Based on an approach for guided semi-automatic…
Perhaps the most prominent current definition of (actual) causality is due to Halpern and Pearl. It is defined using causal models (also known as structural equations models). We abstract the definition, extracting its key features, so that…
A serious defect with the Halpern-Pearl (HP) definition of causality is repaired by combining a theory of causality with a theory of defaults. In addition, it is shown that (despite a claim to the contrary) a cause according to the HP…
The original Halpern-Pearl definition of causality [Halpern and Pearl, 2001] was updated in the journal version of the paper [Halpern and Pearl, 2005] to deal with some problems pointed out by Hopkins and Pearl [2003]. Here the definition…
Satisfiability solving is a common technique for formal verification forming the basis of many proof and model checking systems. Failure to show a proof obligation will produce a counterexample or failure trace with typically many thousands…
We introduce an information measure, termed clarity, motivated by information entropy, and show that it has intuitive properties relevant to dynamic coverage control and informative path planning. Clarity defines the quality of the…
Accountability is an often called for property of technical systems. It is a requirement for algorithmic decision systems, autonomous cyber-physical systems, and for software systems in general. As a concept, accountability goes back to the…
Conformal prediction is a statistically rigorous method for quantifying uncertainty in models by having them output sets of predictions, with larger sets indicating more uncertainty. However, prediction sets are not inherently actionable;…
Data analysis impacts virtually every aspect of our society today. Often, this analysis is performed on an existing dataset, possibly collected through a process that the data scientists had limited control over. The existing data analyzed…
The specification, design, and assurance of safety encompasses various concepts and best practices, subject of reuse in form of patterns. This work summarizes applied research on such concepts and practices with a focus on the last two…
Requirements are informal and semi-formal descriptions of the expected behavior of a system. They are usually expressed in the form of natural language sentences and checked for errors manually, e.g., by peer reviews. Manual checks are…
A coverage type generalizes refinement types found in many functional languages with support for must-style underapproximate reasoning. Property-based testing frameworks are one particularly useful domain where such capabilities are useful…
Standard conformal prediction offers a marginal guarantee on coverage, but for prediction sets to be truly useful, they should ideally ensure coverage conditional on each test point. Unfortunately, it is impossible to achieve exact,…
Causal probing aims to analyze foundation models by examining how intervening on their representation of various latent properties impacts their outputs. Recent works have cast doubt on the theoretical basis of several leading causal…
Data completeness is an essential aspect of data quality, and has in turn a huge impact on the effective management of companies. For example, statistics are computed and audits are conducted in companies by implicitly placing the strong…