[ont.events] U of Toronto Computer Science activities, Feb. 23-27

clarke@utcsri.UUCP (Jim Clarke) (02/16/87)

         (SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road)
              (GB = Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street)

SUMMARY:
Tuesday, February 24, 11 am, SF1101, John Mylopoulos:
       ``Knowledge Representation and Software Development"

Tuesday, February 24, 3 pm, GB 120, Jiawei Han:
       ``Handling Redundancy in the Processing of Recursive Database Queries"

Thursday, February 26, 11 am, GB220, Ozalp Babaoglu:
       ``On the Reliability of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing Systems"

Thursday, February 26, 3 pm, GB220, Joel Friedman:
       ``On the Convergence of Newton's Method"

--------------

COLLOQUIUM, Tuesday, February 24, 11 am, SF1101

                         Professor John Mylopoulos
                           University of Toronto

           ``Knowledge Representation and Software Development"

     Requirements and design languages for software development are gen-
erally accepted by now, but there is little agreement on the principles
that ought to guide their definition and the features that they ought to
support.  The talk will overview research on this topic based on the prem-
ise that software development can be viewed usefully as knowledge base con-
struction.

     Focusing on interactive information systems, such as reservation or
registration systems, we will review features of a design language (Taxis)
and a requirements modelling language (CML) based on this premise.  We will
also report on work in progress to build a software development environment
using these languages.

A.I. SEMINAR, Tuesday, February 24, 3 pm, GB 120

                           Professor Jiawei Han
                          Northwestern University

                 ``Handling Redundancy in the Processing
                      of Recursive Database Queries"

SYSTEMS SEMINAR, Thursday, February 26, 11 am, GB220

                         Professor Ozalp Babaoglu
                            Cornell University

                  ``On the Reliability of Fault-Tolerant
                      Distributed Computing Systems"

     The designer of a fault-tolerant distributed system faces numerous
alternatives.  Using a stochastic model of processor failure times, we
investigate design choices such as replication level, protocol running
time, randomized versus deterministic protocols, fault detection and
authentication.  We use the probability with which a system produces the
correct output as our evaluation criterion.  This contrasts with previous
fault-tolerance results that guarantee correctness only if the percentage
of faulty processors in the system can be bounded.  Our results reveal some
subtle and counterintuitive interactions between the design parameters and
system reliability.

THEORY SEMINAR, Thursday, February 26, 3 pm, GB220

                          Professor Joel Friedman
                         University of California

                 ``On the Convergence of Newton's Method"
-- 

Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
              (416) 978-4058
{allegra,cornell,decvax,linus,utzoo}!utcsri!clarke