CS 525V (S02) : Introduction to Computer-Aided Verification

For general discussion about course topics, use the discussion board in the myWPI area for this course; I will check the board at least once a day. Check the discussion board regularly for course-related announcements; you are responsible for all announcements/postings made to the board. I will use the mailing list only for time-critical announcements.

We will use various (freely downloadable) software packages in the course. All packages will be installed on the CS machines; students are also welcome to install these packages on their personal machines.

• Cadence-SMV, a model-checker. [CTL-based manual | LTL-based manual]

  To use Cadence-SMV on CS, you'll need to add the following environment variable settings to your account (syntax depends on your shell -- post to the discussion board if you need help with this):

  • PATH : /users/csfaculty/kfisler/VerifTools/SMV-Cad/bin
  • MANPATH : /users/csfaculty/kfisler/VerifTools/SMV-Cad/man
  • LD_LIBRARY_PATH : /users/csfaculty/kfisler/VerifTools/SMV-Cad/lib

  The executable is called smv, and is in the bin directory that you need to add to your path. The GUI version is called vw and is in the same path as smv. Note that you need to run these on falcon.wpi.edu. not on cs.wpi.edu.

• Bandera, a model-extraction tool from Kansas State.

• Alloy, a modeling language and associated constraint analyzer from MIT

Course grades will be based on the following activities:

There are no exams in the course.

Class Preparation/Participation Expectations

Since this is a graduate special topics course, part of our goal is for all students to gain experience learning material from papers. I will assign papers for each class meeting. Everyone is expected to read all of the papers before class and come prepared with questions.

For each week, I will designate a few (3-4, depending on final class enrollment) students to serve as "experts". These students should be ready to answer the questions that the class (including me) poses on the papers. Thus, on the weeks that you are an "expert", you need to have read the papers in much greater depth and detail. You are welcome to see me before class with your own questions as you prepare for this role.

I will track class preparation and participation with a weekly scorecard. If it is your turn to serve as an "expert", your participation mark will depend on how well you field questions. If you are not serving as an "expert", your mark will depend on the quality of questions that you ask. Poor questions will count against you, so strive for quality, not quantity, in your questions. As not everyone has learned how to evaluate questions, my expectations for question quality will rise over the course of the semester. You are always welcome to ask for feedback on your questions so that you get better at this important skill.

As a first example, a poor question is one that could apply to any paper/approach, such as "what was the goal of this paper"? You can expect that I will ask such general questions to get the discussion rolling, but your questions should reflect that you've actually read the paper.

Late policy: Assignments (exercises and paper summaries) are due on the date specified on the assignment handout. Assignments may no longer be turned in late. Assignments will not be accepted beyond the due date without prior arrangement or an emergency situation.

Collaboration policy: Unless an assignment states otherwise, you are free to discuss the design of models for homework problems with other students in the class. Design covers the architecture of the model: what modules you need and the interfaces on those modules. The contents and implementation of the modules must be entirely your own work.

Violations of the collaboration policy generally result in an NR or F for the course, in accordance with WPI's academic honesty policy. Your only chance to avoid an NR or F is to admit the violation to me before I detect it.

The following situations would constitute violations of the policy (this list is not exhaustive!):

• Copying any part of an assignment from published papers or sources on the web. This includes quoting even partially from existing sources without quotation marks and proper citation of sources.
• Sharing the answer to any part of an assignment with another student.
• Obtaining a solution to a homework problem from someone who took the course in a previous semester.
• Typing up your assignment at an adjacent machine to a classmate, talking about the assignment in detail as you write it up.
• Sending the code for a completed homework question to a classmate "just so s/he can look at it to figure out how to do the problem".
• Discussing the internals of a module with another student.

If you are unclear as to whether something constitutes cheating, ask!