2012-12-11: Seminar Fisher (DARPA) on Forest - A Language and Toolkit for Programming with Filestores

A filestore is a structured collection of data files housed in a conventional hierarchical file system. Many applications use filestores as a poor-man's database, and the correct execution of these applications requires that the collection of files, directories, and symbolic links stored on disk satisfy a variety of precise invariants. Moreover, all of these structures must have acceptable ownership, permission, and timestamp attributes. Unfortunately, current programming languages do not provide support for documenting assumptions about filestores, detecting errors in them, or safely loading from and storing to them.

2012-11-15: NICTA to develop critical software for multi-million-dollar US Government cyber-security project
A multi-million-dollar contract with the United States Government will see a team of computer scientists from NICTA develop a new breed of software to protect the critical systems in unmanned vehicles from cyber attack.

2012-10-31: Call for Participation - First NICTA Software Systems Summer School

Over two days, this summer school will feature lectures by international leaders in computer systems from industry and academia, interspersed with short student talks and poster sessions. We will emphasise a friendly and informal setting where students can learn and obtain feedback from experts. Topics include compilers, operating systems, language implementation, security and formal verification. Postgraduate students may apply ...

2012-08-27: Best Paper Award - FM 2012

Andreas Bauer together with Ylies Falcone, University of Grenoble, France, won the best paper award at the International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2012) for the paper Decentralised LTL Monitoring. This work is the first to introduce a truly distributed runtime verification procedure for a class of distributed systems that have no means of a global trace collection. FM is one of the premier conferences in the area of formal methods research for the improvement of software and hardware in computer-based systems.

2012-07-04: Best Paper Award — CICM 2012

Timothy Bourke, Matthias Daum, Gerwin Klein and Rafal Kolanski won this year's best paper award at the Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM 2012) for their submission Challenges and Experiences in Managing Large-Scale Proofs. Their paper describes problems and solutions specific to large machine-checked proofs such as NICTA's seL4 microkernel verification or formally verified software stacks as in the German Verisoft project. Such proofs take multiple people over multiple years. They create new problems, because no single human has the ability to understand all details of all aspects of the proof.