http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/ All en-gb 360 Tue, 22 May 2012 07:46:25 GMT Tue, 22 May 2012 07:46:25 GMT All http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss/ http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/750.html Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-verification-750 Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:56:27 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/761.html <br/>147 Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-infsys-761 Fri, 11 May 2012 20:06:52 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/762.html <p><span style="font-size: small;">For this inaugural Cyber Security Seminar, we welcome Martin Borrett, Director of the IBM Institute of Advanced Security, Europe.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">In this short session we will describe and discuss the big security challenges organisation face in 2012. IBM invests a significant effort into security research, we will share some of the key themes and innovation agenda that IBM is following. Finally we will share IBM's Security Strategy and at a high level its solutions to address the security market place.</span></p> <br/>Access Grid Room, 277 Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-cybersecurity-762 Tue, 15 May 2012 15:24:28 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/764.html <p>TBA</p> Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-Security-764 Fri, 18 May 2012 11:37:14 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/763.html <p>TBA</p> Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-Security-763 Fri, 18 May 2012 11:26:19 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/760.html <p><span style="font-size: small;">A well established noninterference property in untimed CSP is that</span><span style="font-size: small;"> lazily abstracting high-level actions leaves</span><span style="font-size: small;"> a deterministic process. This is problematic in Timed CSP (both</span><span style="font-size: small;"> continuous and discrete) because there are</span><span style="font-size: small;"> then many refinement maximal properties that are not deterministic.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> This phenomenon is a result of No</span><span style="font-size: small;"> Instantaneous Withdrawal (NIW): if a process offers an event b up to</span><span style="font-size: small;"> time t, then b is still possible AT time t.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> We give exact characterisations of maximality in continuous and</span><span style="font-size: small;"> discrete Timed CSP in terms of the</span><span style="font-size: small;"> extended idea of Quasi-Determinism, and justify an alternative</span><span style="font-size: small;"> definition of noninterference in terms of these.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;">By generalising Ouaknine's theory of digitisation for Timed CSP we are</span><span style="font-size: small;"> able to establish the following curious</span><span style="font-size: small;"> result: an integer Timed CSP process P is noninterfering as judged</span><span style="font-size: small;"> over the continuous model of Timed CSP if</span><span style="font-size: small;"> and only if the process 2P (which runs exactly half as fast) is</span><span style="font-size: small;"> quasi-deterministic over the discrete model.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;">We show how to check this property in the Timed CSP model of FDR 2.94</span><span style="font-size: small;"> and give an example.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;">[A draft of this paper can be found on my website. This work builds</span><span style="font-size: small;"> on the doctoral work of Huang Jian.]</span></p> <br/>Room 147 Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-Security-760 Fri, 11 May 2012 09:45:26 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/732.html <br/>Lecture Theatre A Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-CompBioPublicSeminars-732 Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:48:01 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/731.html <br/>Lecture Theatre A Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-CompBioPublicSeminars-731 Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:48:01 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/697.html <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>To be defined, but should deal with observations on the evolution of a large piece of code.</p> <br/>Room 051 Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-Software Engineering at Credit Suisse-697 Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:20:12 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/696.html <p>Quality assurance in very large information systems is a big challenge. We will talk about testing as a means to assure appropriate quality. Testing practices we will discuss include a multi-stage testing process, separate organizations for testing in order to be more efficient and avoid conflicts of interest, avoiding sensitive data in development and testing and static quality assurance. We will focus on how to test in a large, highly integrated application landscape. Finally, we will discuss testing practices that go beyond functional tests, such as performance, penetration, and destruction tests.</p> <br/>Room 051 Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-Software Engineering at Credit Suisse-696 Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:20:12 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/695.html <p>In this talk, we will make the point that the security of an information system is determined by the weakest link in a long chain of security measures, both technical and organizational. Very often this weakest link is human behavior, while it is very rarely a theoretical weakness in the cryptographic algorithm. We will show, how we focus on holistic design of security measures in order to strengthen the weakest link. Finally, we will discuss the necessary measures to secure financial transactions in the Internet and, becoming more important every day, on mobile devices.</p> <br/>Room 051 Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-Software Engineering at Credit Suisse-695 Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:20:12 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/744.html <p><span style="font-size: small;">The talk presents results based on encoding various fragments of the Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) or the UML modelling language to Description Logic and, in particular, to the lightweight DL-Lite logics. Results are presented both on combined complexity for checking the satisfiability of a schema and on data complexity for query answering under the constraints expressed by the schema. Schema language constructors include ISA between entities and relationships, disjointness and covering of entities and relationships, cardinality constraints for entities participating in relationships and their refinements as well as multiplicity constraints for attributes. </span></p> <br/>147 Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-infsys-744 Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:54:09 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/753.html Connectivity, Interference and Energy conservations, are key aspects in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETS). I propose a Probabilistic Energy -aware calculus for the analysis of both such aspects of MANETS. This calculus is a probabilistic process algebra, in the style of CCS, capturing essential characteristics of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, including the ability of nodes to broadcast a message to any other node within its physical transmission range, and to move in and out of the transmission range of other nodes in the network. Probability distributions are used to described the mobility of nodes. The semantic is inspired to Segala’s probabilistic automata, driven by schedulers to resolve the non-deterministic choices among the probability distributions over target states. A probabilistic observational congruence has been defined together with a bisimulation-based proof technique. Finally two different preorders has been defined in order to verify whether two networks exhibit the same observable probabilistic behavior in terms of connectivity, but with dfferent performances in terms of energy conservation or Interference. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-verification-753 Wed, 02 May 2012 08:22:32 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/717.html <p>Model checking based on Petri net unfoldings is an approach widely applied to cope with the state space explosion problem caused by concurrency. In this talk I will describe a recent condensed representation of a Petri net's behaviour called merged processes, which copes well not only with concurrency, but also with other sources of state space explosion, like sequences of choices and non-safeness. Moreover, this representation is sufficiently similar to the traditional unfoldings, so that a large body of results developed for the latter can be re-used. Experiments indicate that this representation of a Petri net's behaviour alleviates the state space explosion problem to a significant degree and is suitable for model checking.</p> <br/>147 Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-verification-717 Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:00:02 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/738.html <br/>Lecture Theatre B (LTB) Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-oasis-738 Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:40:31 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/734.html <br/>Lecture Theatre B Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-oasis-734 Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:50:44 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/756.html <p>This talk looks at topics in analysis and synthesis over stochastic hybrid systems, a class of probabilistic models with heterogeneous (continuous and discrete) dynamics. The talk puts forward approaches to investigate these problems based on known concepts from the formal verification literature, and discusses in detail a few results and research directions.</p> <br/>Lecture Theatre B Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-departmental-756 Thu, 10 May 2012 09:37:36 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/755.html <p>Programmable DNA nanotechnology is a rapidly emerging field that creates and programs a wide variety of synthetic nanosystems to autonomously assemble themselves from molecular components and perform their assigned tasks. Programming is done by carefully choosing the molecular strands and their concentrations such that they will achieve the desired shape, structure, function or dynamic behavior.</p> <p>We are interested in the requirements for these programmed systems. What does it mean to specify and validate requirements on programmable DNA self-assemblies? How can we verify formally that a self-assembly satisfies its requirements? It is especially important to begin answering these questions now because envisioned future uses will be safety-critical (e.g., RNA nanomachines embedded in human cells).</p> <p>We propose an extension of van Lamsweerde's goal-oriented requirements engineering to the domain of programmable DNA nanotechnology. We explain this extended method and illustrate it by engineering requirements for a system of molecular detectors (DNA origami "pliers"; that capture target molecules) invented by Kuzuya, Sakai, Yamazaki, Xu, and Komiyama (2011). We model this system in the PRISM probabilistic symbolic model checker, and use PRISM to verify that requirements are satisfied, provided that the ratio of target molecules to detectors is neither too high nor too low. This gives prima facie evidence that software engineering methods can be used to make DNA nanotechnology more productive, predictable and safe.</p> <br/>Lecture Theatre B Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-departmental-755 Thu, 03 May 2012 15:09:10 GMT http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/752.html <br/>Lecture Theatre B Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford SeminarSeries All oucl-seminar-departmental-752 Tue, 01 May 2012 11:23:53 GMT