--- a/bsc-projects-13.html Mon Jun 02 14:42:38 2014 +0100
+++ b/bsc-projects-13.html Wed Jun 04 11:34:01 2014 +0100
@@ -248,7 +248,7 @@
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoffeeScript">Coffeescript</A> is a similar project
except that it is already quite <A HREF="http://coffeescript.org">mature</A>. And finally not to
forget <A HREF="http://www.typescriptlang.org">TypeScript</A> developed by Microsoft. The main
- difference between these projects and this one is that they translate int relatively high-level
+ difference between these projects and this one is that they translate into relatively high-level
JavaScript code; none of them use the much lower levels <A HREF="http://asmjs.org">asm.js</A> and
<A HREF="https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki">emscripten</A>.
</p>
@@ -322,8 +322,8 @@
<p>
<B>Description:</B>
One of the more annoying aspects of giving a lecture is to ask a question
- to the students and no matter how easy the questions is to not
- receive an answer. Recently, the online course system
+ to the students and no matter how easy the question is to not
+ receive any answer. Recently, the online course system
<A HREF="http://www.udacity.com">Udacity</A> made an art out of
asking questions during lectures (see for example the
<A HREF="http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012">Web Application Engineering</A>
@@ -332,7 +332,7 @@
click on the appropriate answer. This works very well in the online world.
For “real-world” lectures, the department has some
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_response">clickers</A>
- (these are little devices part of an audience response systems). However,
+ (these are little devices which form a part of an audience response systems). However,
they are a logistic nightmare for the lecturer: they need to be distributed
during the lecture and collected at the end. Nowadays, where students
come with their own laptop or smartphone to lectures, this can
@@ -535,12 +535,33 @@
<A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de">Isabelle</A>. This theorem prover
has been used to establish the correctness of some quite large
programs (for example an <A HREF="http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/">operating system</A>).
- On a much smaller scale, there are a few programs and underlying algorithms where it
- is not really understood whether they always compute a correct result. The aim of this
+ Together with colleagues from Nanjing, I used this theorem prover to establish the correctness of a
+ scheduling algorithm, called
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_inheritance">Priority Inheritance</A>,
+ for real time operating systems. This scheduling algorithm is part of the operating
+ system that drives, for example, the
+ <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover">Mars rovers</A>.
+ Actually, the very first Mars rover mission in 1997 did not have this
+ algorithm switched on and it almost caused a catastrophic mission failure (see
+ this youtube video <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyx7kARrGeM">here</A>
+ for an explanation what happened).
+ We were able to prove the correctness of this algorithm, but were also able to
+ establish the correctness of some optimisations in this
+ <A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Publications/pip.pdf">paper</A>.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>On a much smaller scale, there are a few small programs and underlying algorithms where it
+ is not really understood whether they always compute a correct result (for example the
+ regular expression matcher by Sulzmann and Lu in project [CU1]). The aim of this
project is to completely specify an algorithm in Isabelle and then prove it correct (that is,
it always computes the correct result).
</p>
+ <p>
+ <B>Skills:</B>
+ This project is for a very good student with a knack for theory and formal reasoning.
+ </p>
+
<li> <H4>Earlier Projects</H4>
I am also open to project suggestions from you. You might find some inspiration from my earlier projects:
@@ -553,7 +574,7 @@
</TABLE>
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