6th Refinement Workshop

The Sixth Refinement Workshop took place at City University in London from 5th to 7th January 1994. The present volume includes all of the papers which were submitted and accepted for presentation, together with two papers by invited speakers. The workshops in the series have generally occurred at one year intervals but in this last case a two year period had elapsed. These workshops have established themselves as an important event in the calendar for all those who are interested in progress in the underlying theory of refinement and in the take-up by industry of the methods supported by that theory. One of the proposed themes of the sixth workshop was the reporting of successful adoption in industry of rigorous software development methods. The programme committee was perhaps slightly disappointed by the response from industry to the call in this respect. However, the recent period could be characterised as one of consolidation, when those companies which have made the decision that formal development methods are important to their business have been adopting them where appropriate and finding them to be worthwhile. On the other hand,. the difficult economic climate which exists in most parts of the developed world is perhaps not the context within which companies still dubious about the benefits are goil'\g to opt for making major changes in their working practices.

This volume results from the four-day scientific Second International East/West Database Workshop which took place 25th-28th September 1994, in Klagenfurt, Austria, continuing a series of workshops started in Kiev in 1990 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 504, Springer, "Next Generation Information System Technology"). The aims of this workshop are twofold: first, to provide a forum for the presentation and in-depth discussion of scientific achievements in the field of advanced databases that will effectively improve the building and use of future information systems; second, to establish and increase communication between research communities which were formerly separated and, therefore, had only rare opportunities to interact. It should establish contacts between researchers from the East and from the West to make exchange of ideas possible and to trigger collaborations. However, it is not only political borders which change their perviousness as a result of -or giving rise to -new autonomies or new possibilities for interaction and collaboration. The same happens with the borders between scientific areas, in particular in the dynamically evolving areas of computer science. Databases and programming languages are integrated in object oriented databases, database and information retrieval technology form together the basis for modern (multimedia) information systems. Furthermore, the borders between different information systems change and allow various forms of collaboration while maintaining different degrees of autonomy. Heterogeneous and distributed databases are enabling technologies for these systems.

This book gives a practical introduction to the B specification language and method, an approach to the development of high-quality software using rigorous CASE techniques. It is suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses, in addition to being an introduction for industrial practitioners. Extensive examples of all development life-cycle stages are given, including animation, proof, design and code generation in C. Two large case studies and exercises with solutions are provided. The authors have extensive experience in teaching B and in its industrial application to high integrity systems. The book uses the B Toolkit to support the text, but it is also relevant to users of alternative toolsets for B. Contents:Abstract MachinesConstructing SpecificationsDesign and RefinementProofImplementationCase StudiesExercise SolutionsB AMIN and ZB Notation Summary Readership: Graduate and undergraduate students in computer science, software engineering and software specification. Keywords:Specifications;B AMIN;Z;B Notation

This volume presents the proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on the Theory and Practice of Software Engineering, TAPSOFT '95, held in Aarhus, Denmark in May 1995. TAPSOFT '95 celebrates the 10th anniversary of this conference series started in Berlin in 1985 to bring together theoretical computer scientists and software engineers (researchers and practitioners) with a view to discussing how formal methods can usefully be applied in software development. The volume contains seven invited papers, among them one by Vaugham Pratt on the recently revealed bug in the Pentium chip, and 44 revised full papers selected from a total of 147 submissions. In addition the TAPSOFT '95 proceedings contains 10 tool descriptions.

This volume results from the regular sessions of the Second International Workshop of the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter "Advances in Databases and Information Systems" (ADBIS'95) that took place 27th-30th June 1995, in Moscow, Russia. ADBIS'95 continues a series of annual Workshops on Advances in Databases and Information Systems organized by the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter in cooperation with the Russian Founda tion for Basic Research. Past successful ADBIS conferences include the ADBIS'93 and ADBIS'94 Workshops that took place in Moscow. The aims of these workshops are to provide a forum for the presentation and in-depth discussion of advanced research directions that will effectively improve the building and use of future information systems and to increase communication between the Eastern and Western research communities which were formerly separated and still have only rare possibilities to interact. Improving of the contacts and exchange of ideas between researchers from the East and from the West will eventually lead to better collaboration between them. The ADBIS'95 Call for Submissions attracted 60 submissions from 15 countries of which 35 submissions were accepted for presentation at the regular sessions, 9 as posters, and 7 as presentations for a special session for the Information Systems for Science. This volume contains the papers presented in the regular sessions.

The areas of active and real-time databases have seen a tremendous growth of interest in the past few years, particularly with regard to their support of time-critical and embedded applications. ARTDB-95 provided, therefore, an important forum for researchers from both communities to discuss research results, and also to chart new directions for the future. As well as the 11 submitted papers presented at the workshop, this volume also contains 4 invited papers on the following topics: the impact of active databases on commercial practice; the optimization of active database transactions; the need for better language, compiler and tool support for real-time databases; and the origin of time constraints associated with data, events and actions. Together the papers give a comprehensive overview of current research, and will provide invaluable reading for academic and industrial researchers and students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

This volume presents a variety of papers bearing on the relation between deontic logics, logics of action, and normative systems, i.e. systems of or about interacting agents (computers, human beings, corporations, etc.) whose behaviour is subject to ideal constraints that may not always be fulfilled in practice. The papers range from theoretical studies of the logical and conceptual tools needed, to studies of various applications. The set of papers collected in this book should be of interest to investigators working in a variety of fields, from philosophy, logic and legal theory to artificial intelligence, computer and management sciences, since it covers topics ranging from theoretical research on foundational issues in deontic and action logics, defeasible reasoning, decision theory, ethical theory, and legal theory, to research on a variety of issues relevant to applications connected with expert systems in the law, document specification, automation of defeasible reasoning, specification of responsibilities and powers in organizations, normative systems specification, confidentiality in database systems, and a host of other applications.

The papers that appear in this volume are refereed versions of presenta tions made at the third Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, held at Stirling University, Scotland, from 31 August to 2 September 1994. The aim of this series of conferences has been to explore the interface between Neural Computing and Psychology: this has been a fruitful area for many researchers for a number of reasons. The development ofNeural Computation has supplied tools to researchers in Cognitive Neuroscience, allowing them to look at possible mechanisms for implementing theories which would otherwise remain 'black box' techniques. These theories may be high-level theories, concerned with interaction between a number of brain areas, or low-level, describing the way in which smaller local groups of neurons behave. Neural Computation techniques have allowed computer scientists to implement systems which are based on how real brains appear to function, providing effective pattern recognition systems. We can thus mount a two-pronged attack on perception. The papers here come from both the Cognitive Psychology viewpoint and from the Computer Science viewpoint: it is a mark of the growing maturity of the interface between the two subjects that they can under stand each other's papers, and the level of discussion at the workshop itself showed how important each camp considers the other to be. The papers here are divided into four sections, reflecting the primary areas of the material.