Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 10:48:18 -0600
From: Jared Davis
Subject: This week in ACL2 (Note: Room Change!)


Hi,

This week, we will be meeting in TAY 3.128 (the faculty lounge) rather than 
ACES.  We will meet at the usual time and day, that is, from 4pm - 6pm on 
Wednesday.

Carlos Pacheco will be presenting some of the work he is doing at MIT:

"We describe a technique that helps a test engineer select,
from a large set of randomly-generated candidate test inputs, a small
subset likely to reveal faults in the software under test.  The
technique takes a program or software component, plus a set of normal
executions--say, from an existing test suite, or from
observations of the software running properly.  The technique works by
extracting an operational model of the software's operation, and
comparing each candidate input's operational pattern of execution
against the model. Candidates whose operational pattern is suggestive
of a fault are further reduced by selecting only one input per such
pattern. The result is a small portion of the original candidates,
deemed most likely to reveal faults.  Thus, the technique can also be
seen as an error-detection technique.  We have implemented these ideas
in the Eclat tool, designed for unit testing of Java classes. Eclat
generates a large number of candidate inputs and uses the technique to
select only a few of them as likely to be fault-revealing.  In our
experiments, the inputs that it selects are an order of magnitude as
likely to reveal faults as the original candidate inputs."

Thanks, and hope to see you there,

     Jared