Invited Speakers

Jean-Raymond Abrial

Tom Maibaum

Jean-Raymond Abrial is the originator of the Z notation (typically used for formal specification of software), during his time at the Programming Research Group within the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, and later the B-Method (normally used for software development), two leading formal methods for software engineering. He is the author of The B-Book: Assigning Programs to Meanings (ISBN 0-521-49619-5). For much of his career he has been an independent consultant, as much at home working with industry as academia. In recent years he has developed the Event-B formalism which extends B to deal with overall system design. Currently he is a Professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland where he plays a leading role in the EU-funded RODIN project.  RODIN has developed an open development environment for complex systems based on Event-B.

Tom Maibaum is a Professor in the Foundations of Software Engineering at McMaster University, Canada.  His research interests have focused for over 30 years on the theory of specification and its application in various contexts. In the early 80s, he started work on what has become known as Requirements Specification and made a major contribution through the FORTEST PROJECT. This project was the first to use deontic logic, the logic of legal reasoning. In the last few years, he has again become interested in the topic because of theory required to underpin e-commerce, and, in particular, concepts such as trust, deception, contract negotiation and execution. There is also a strong connection with fault tolerance mechanisms and their logical modelling. The requirements specification work led to component based modelling and the application of coordination concepts to software architecture. Recent work on this area has focused on modelling dynamic reconfiguration and the analysis of aspects and non functional requirements in terms of architectural transformations.  Prof Maibaum has had many collaborative projects with industry since 1983 and has been a consultant to GEC, HP Labs, and various other companies over the past 2 decades.  He has also been an expert witness in several IT related cases.