Constructor Institute of Technology Research Contributions Unearthed for Schaffhausen: CIRCUS Workshop

This event will feature a day of presentations by Constructor Institute of Technology professors and researchers, showcasing our work to both the larger Constructor network and the local community in Schaffhausen. This is an important opportunity for the public to gain insights into cutting-edge research and innovations that have the potential to impact everyday life and drive technological advancements in our society.

Topics we will explore include:

• The necessity and achievements of software verification
• The potential for computers to correct human errors
• Quantum advancements: from computing to software engineering
• A quantum game for schools and the general public
• Assessing the quality of smart cities
• Smart monitoring of complex ecosystems
• And many more

Join us onsite or online (link provided upon registration) for an exciting academic event that fosters collaboration, networking, and the exchange of innovative ideas.

• Welcome note by Bertrand Meyer, Provost at Constructor Institute of Technology
  
  
• Title: Why do we need to verify software, and what can we achieve? by Bertrand Meyer
  Almost all aspects of today’s world depend on software; and yet software systems fail again and again. Software verification is devoted to ensuring that software is correct, robust and secure. It employs a number of techniques, some static (based on analyzing program texts) and others dynamic (based on executing a program to test its behavior). Several of them are represented in the research of the Chair of Software Engineering at Constructor Institute of Technology.
  
  As an introduction to the presentation of these individual research efforts, the talk will summarize the challenges of software verification and introduce the main contemporary approaches and their respective benefits and limitations.
  
  
• Title: Software verification in practice: combining proofs and tests by Li Huang
  Tests and proofs are two common software verification approaches. They are characterized by dual benefits and limitations. Tests have, in their favor, their concreteness and relative ease of preparation; they face, however, a fundamental limitation: successful tests, regardless of how many of them, do not guarantee the correctness of software. Proofs do hold that promise of correctness, when they succeed. In practice, however, the path towards a proof is arduous and frustrating. Is it possible to combine those approaches such that we can gain benefits from their complementarity? This talk demonstrates such a possibility: it will first show an approach to generating useful test data from failed proofs, and then it will cover the topics on how to use proofs to improve the quality of test data, with respect to human understandability and structural code coverage.
  
  
• Title: Can the computer correct our mistakes?  by Viktoryia Kananchuk
  Can a computer find and fix bugs in code instead of a human, and which categories of bugs are the easiest to automatically repair? To answer this question, we analyzed bugs from real projects. Our goal is to identify the most frequently occurring errors and create patterns for their automatic detection and correction.
  
  
• Title: What is a class invariant and why do we need it? by Ilgiz Mustafin and Alessandro Schena
  Class invariants are a powerful tool to model the consistency rules of OOP programs. In the talk, we will address and clarify some misconceptions about what class invariants are and why they are important.
  We will show how to write class invariants and how they help to design and debug systems with practical examples.
  
  
• Session I Q&A
  
  
• Title: Quantum: from Computing to Software Engineering by Manuel Oriol
  Regularly, in the news we hear about quantum computing as a game changer. This presentation is a short introduction to quantum computing and explain its potential and challenges. The difficulty to write quantum-enabled quantum code makes it difficult to understand and use by non-specialists. The chair of quantum software engineering focuses on developing software engineering for quantum computing, so that it becomes usable by regular developers. The presentation finish by presenting these efforts in a consolidated manner.
  
  
• Title: Virtual teaching assistant for Capstone project course by Julia Kotovich
  Virtual Teaching Assistants (TAs) are becoming pervasive in different aspects of our lives. Although personal assistance has historically been the primary area of usage, teachers and students have recently devised and implemented several alternatives in the educational setting. The use of Virtual Teaching Assistants in education and Computer Science especially can bring relevant advantages. They provide the possibility to enhance the quality of teaching and the learning environment for both offline and online courses. One example of a virtual assistant used in the field of education is a Chatbot. A Chatbot is defined as a virtual assistant that can respond appropriately to a range of user inquiries. An example of a Chatbot that can help students with one of their courses, such as the Capstone project, will be presented during this session
  
  
• Title: C4Q: A Chatbot for Quantum by Yaiza Aragonés-Soria
  Quantum computing is a growing field that promises many real-world applications such as quantum cryptography or quantum finance. The number of people able to use quantum computing is however still very small. This limitation comes from the difficulty to understand the concepts and to know how to start coding. Therefore, there is a need for tools that can assist non-expert in overcoming this complexity. One possibility would be to use existing conversational agents. Unfortunately ChatGPT and other Large-Language Models produce inaccurate results.
  This article presents C4Q, a chatbot that answers accurately basic questions and guides users when trying to code quantum programs.  Contrary to other approaches C4Q uses a pre-trained large language model only to discover and classify user requests. It then generates an accurate answer using an own engine. Thanks to this architectural design, C4Q’s answers are always correct, and thus C4Q can become a support tool that makes quantum computing more available to non-experts.
  
  
• Title: Niel’s Chess: A Quantum Game for Schools and the General Public by Tamás Varga
  A quantum variant of chess is introduced, which can be played on a traditional board, without using computers or other electronic devices. The rules of the game arise naturally by combining the rules of conventional chess with key quantum-physical effects such as superposition and entanglement. Niel’s Chess is recommended for fun, education and outreach, to everyone who wishes to play a creative game with historical roots and at the same time gain intuition about the foundational quantum effects that power cutting-edge technologies like quantum computing and quantum communication, which are poised to revolutionize our society in the coming decades. Pilot suggests any chess player who is 10+ years old can play the game.
  
  
• Session II Q&A
  
  
• Title: Assessing the quality of smart cities by Mauro Pezzè
  Smart cities, and more generally smart ecosystems are becoming an essential part of the infrastructure of the human society.  Failures in smart ecosystems may have disruptive effects on human life and society.   In this talk we will see the main characteristics of smart ecosystems, and understand the need and challenges in assessing the quality of ecosystems to prevent ecosystem failures with major impact on the human society.  We will overview the core contribution of the STAR Software Testing and Analysis Research char at Constructor Institute of Technology.
  
  
• Title: Testing Human Centric Systems by Alind Xhyra and Noura El Moussa
  Humans are integral part of smart cities and ecosystems in general, and not some users.  All approaches to test software systems, and in particular interactive systems, focus on the software system, by assuming that users interact with the system through systems fiend interfaces.  The distinction between human life and interactions with a smart city vanishes: humans live in the smart city and do not simply interact with it.   To test a smart city, we shall move form the models of the system that we used so far to models of the humans.  In this talk, we will understand how we infer models of the behavior of humans and social groups to thoroughly test a smart city and more generally a smart ecosystem.
  
  
• Title: Smart monitoring complex ecosystems by Ketai Qiu and Francesco Lomio
  Smart cities and more generally smart ecosystems emerge from the co-existence of independently owned systems that evolve and chance ove time.  Monitoring a smart ecosystem is essential to predict major issues before they occur, and activate preventive actions to reduce the impact on the human society.  Monitoring an evolving systems challenges researchers with new issues.  In this talk, we will see the difficulty of monitoring a systems with a variable set of metrics that derive from a set of systems that evolve and cage over time, and we will see how to define a smart monitor for complex cloud dynamic systems, where the systems comprising the cloud change and evolve over time.
  
  
• Title: Smart EcoSystem Health by Matteo Ciniselli, Davide Molinelli, Niccolò Puccinelli
  The basic concept of system correctness defined as correspondence between the system behavior and the specifications is not enough to capture the quality aspects of a smart city.  The behavior of a smart city may more or less welcome for different actors in the city with sometime contradicting expectations, and is not simply correct or wrong.  Monitoring a smart ecosystem share the core issues of dynamic  reconfigurability with a complex cloud system, and goes beyond with behaviors that emerge from the correct albeit sometime contradicting requirements of systems and humans in the ecosystem.  In this talk, we will introduce the concept of system health to capture the expectation of a smart ecosystem ,and we will see how unexpected combinations of correct behaviors of system and possible human behaviors may lead to system failures.
  
  
• Title: Autonomic Testing by Luca di Grazia, Davide Molinelli, Ketai Qiu
  Smart cities and smart ecosystems evolve over time and adapt to emerging situations that cannot be tested before production.  Testing in production becomes an essential feature to assess the quality of smart ecosystems.  Automatically generating test cases from scenarios that emerge in production can reveal emergent issues and trigger corrective actions before too late.  We will present an approach to automatically generate test cases to augment test suites with not-yet-tested- configuration by means of Large Language Models (LLMs) that we use to detect unexplored dangerous scenarios in the field to be tested.
  
  
• Title: Digital Mirrors by Francesco Lomio, Davide Molinelli, Luca di Grazia, Ketai Qiu
  Testing smart cities and smart ecosystems in production is impossible due to the impact on humans.  We can test the individual systems on testbeds, before deployment, but this does not prevent ecosystem failure that emerge despite the correctness of the individual systems.  Full simulators of smart cities and smart ecosystems may be too expensive to build and maintain, and in any case may miss scenarios that emerge only in production.  Digital mirrors captures all and only the essential aspects need for testing to get a sustainable environment for thorough testing.  We present th initial study of the definition of a digital mirror to study the read traffic ecosystem.
  
  
• Session III Q&A
  
  
• Title: The second quantum revolution by Wolfgang Tittel
  Is it possible to see individual atoms? Use single photons to send information over hundreds of kilometers? Or to observe perfectly correlated results of measurements of distant particles—akin to identical outcomes of two coin-flips—even though each individual measurement—each coin flip—is completely unpredictable? Surprisingly, all this is possible, as has been demonstrated during the past 50 years in countless laboratories around the world. But beyond being mindboggling features of quantum theory, these phenomena are also at the heart of the second quantum revolution, which promises technology that allows solving computational problems that are intractable using classical computers, and establishing encryption keys in a provably secure manner. In this talk I will give a simple introduction to the promise and the status of the second quantum revolution. The presentation is geared towards a general audience with interest in science and technology as well as curiosity and an open mind.
  
  
• Session IV Q&A
  
  
• Conclusion by the president of Constructor Institute of Technology, Manuel Oriol
  
  

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