Prof. Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University gave a talk on The Human Factors of Formal Methods for Software Systems on 12 February. Here is the summary for his talk:
As formal methods for software engineering improve in expressiveness and power, they create new opportunities for non-expert adoption. In principle, formal tools are now powerful enough to enable developers to scalably validate realistic systems artefacts without extensive formal training. However, realising this potential for adoption requires attention to not only the technical but also the human side—which has received extraordinarily little attention from formal-methods research.
This talk presents some of our efforts to address this paucity. We apply ideas from cognitive science, human-factors research, and education theory to improve the usability of formal methods. Along the way, we present misconceptions suffered by non-experts, and show how technically appealing designs—which experts may value—may fail to help regular users.
Shriram Krishnamurthi is a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. With collaborators and students, he has created several influential systems: DrRacket and WeScheme (programming environments), Margrave (policy analyzer), FrTime and Flapjax (reactive programming languages), Lambda-JS and TeJaS (semantics and types for JavaScript), and Flowlog (software-defined networking programming language and verifier). He is now working on the Pyret programming language and Forge analyzer. Shriram’s many contributions to multiple fields of computer science and engineering — programming language design, security, computer networks, human computer interaction, and formal methods — have been driven by his belief in the centrality of programming language abstractions.
He is the author of Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation and a co-author of How to Design Programs and A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing. He co-directs the Bootstrap integrated computing outreach program.
Prof. Krishnamurthi has won SIGPLAN’s Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, SIGPLAN’s Software Award (jointly), SIGSOFT’s Influential Educator Award, SIGPLAN’s Distinguished Educator Award (jointly), and Brown University’s Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship for distinguished contribution to undergraduate education. He has authored over a dozen papers recognized for honours by program committees. He has an honorary doctorate from the Università della Svizzera Italiana.
Prof. Krishnamurthi visited IIIT as a part of the distinguished computing visitor program initiated by ACM India. His visit was supported by the Jay Pulur foundation.
February 2024