Related papers: Extending Design by Contract for Aspect-Oriented P…
Agent-based models (ABMs) are ubiquitous in research and industry. Currently, simulating ABMs involves at least some imperative (step-by-step) computer instructions. An alternative approach is declarative programming, in which a set of…
Algorithms play a crucial role in many technological systems that control or affect various aspects of our lives. As a result, providing explanations for their decisions to address the needs of users and organisations is increasingly…
Eventual consistency is a more natural model than strong consistency for a distributed system, since it is closer to the underlying physical reality. Therefore, we propose that it is important to find a programming model that is both…
The fundamental tension between availability and consistency shapes the design of distributed storage systems. Classical results capture extreme points of this trade-off: the CAP theorem shows that strong models like linearizability…
Performing dependability evaluation along with other analyses at architectural level allows both making architectural tradeoffs and predicting the effects of architectural decisions on the dependability of an application. This paper gives…
We present Unit-B, a formal method inspired by Event-B and UNITY. Unit-B aims at the stepwise design of software systems satisfying safety and liveness properties. The method features the novel notion of coarse and fine schedules, a…
Programs with control are usually modeled using lambda calculus extended with control operators. Instead of modifying lambda calculus, we consider a different model of computation. We introduce continuation calculus, or CC, a deterministic…
Code language models are increasingly adopted for both understanding and generative tasks. Despite their success, these models frequently produce overconfident incorrect predictions and underconfident correct predictions, undermining their…
Argumentation is a promising model for reasoning with uncertain knowledge. The key concept of acceptability enables to differentiate arguments and counterarguments: The certainty of a proposition can then be evaluated through the most…
Test case prioritization focuses on finding a suitable order of execution of the test cases in a test suite to meet some performance goals like detecting faults early. It is likely that some test cases execute the program parts that are…
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) in natural language processing enables organizations to understand customer opinions on specific product aspects. While deep learning models are widely used for English ABSA, their application in…
Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is a promising methodology which provides powerful techniques to improve the modularity of the software by separating the cross-cutting concerns from the core functionality. Since evolution is a…
We present a novel and well automatable approach to formal verification of C programs with underspecified semantics, i.e., a language semantics that leaves open the order of certain evaluations. First, we reduce this problem to…
In this paper, we present a probabilistic adaptation of an Assume/Guarantee contract formalism. For the sake of generality, we assume that the extended state machines used in the contracts and implementations define sets of runs on a given…
When developing complex software and systems, contracts provide a means for controlling the complexity by dividing the responsibilities among the components of the system in a hierarchical fashion. In specific application areas, dedicated…
This work mainly addresses continuous-time multiagent consensus networks where an adverse attacker affects the convergence performances of said protocol. In particular, we develop a novel secure-by-design approach in which the presence of a…
This paper introduces language-based agent control (LBAC), a new programming model for agentic applications that brings techniques from programming languages and language-based security to the problem of agent control. In conventional…
Formal contracts and assertions are effective methods to enhance software quality by enforcing preconditions, postconditions, and invariants. Previous research has demonstrated the value of contracts in traditional software development…
Blockchains with smart contracts are distributed ledger systems that achieve block-state consistency among distributed nodes by only allowing deterministic operations of smart contracts. However, the power of smart contracts is enabled by…
Modern distributed systems often rely on so called weakly-consistent databases, which achieve scalability by sacrificing the consistency guarantee of distributed transaction processing. Such databases have been formalised in two different…