Jeannette M. Wing - Böcker

Data science is the foundation of our modern world. It underlies applications used by billions of people every day, providing new tools, forms of entertainment, economic growth, and potential solutions to difficult, complex problems. These opportunities come with significant societal consequences, raising fundamental questions about issues such as data quality, fairness, privacy, and causation. In this book, four leading experts convey the excitement and promise of data science and examine the major challenges in gaining its benefits and mitigating its harms. They offer frameworks for critically evaluating the ingredients and the ethical considerations needed to apply data science productively, illustrated by extensive application examples. The authors' far-ranging exploration of these complex issues will stimulate data science practitioners and students, as well as humanists, social scientists, scientists, and policy makers, to study and debate how data science can be used more effectively and more ethically to better our world.

The LARCH family of formal specification languages and tools was originally developed in the USA. Its user community has now spread to Europe and several industrial trial firms are interested in using it in their system development programs. It differs from the other "higher profile file" languages such as Z and VDM in three respects: firstly, it was designed to specify programs rather than mathematical models and therefore addresses the complexities of real programs; secondly, it has been specifically developed as a practical tool for use in several major application domains; finally, it has a state-of-the-art semantic analysis tool in the form of the LARCH Prover. This volume contains the papers presented at the First International Workshop on LARCH, held in Dedham, USA, 13-15 July 1992. The workshop brought together for the first time those who have designed the LARCH languages, built tool support for them, and used them to specify and reason about soft- and hardware systems. It encouraged discussion about how the LARCH languages and Prover are being used, and assessed plans for development oping them.The aim of the workshop was to raise the profile of LARCH, and to provide impetus for continued research into its tools and languages. Among the topics covered in this volume are: the mechanical verification of concurrent systems with TLA; the DECspec project; the preliminary design of LARCH/C++; generating proof obligations for circuits; lock-level verification; checking software design using formal specifications; optimising programs with specifications; and a report on the formal basis of generics. "First International Workshop on LARCH" provides a comprehensive overview of the international use and development of LARCH. It should be useful to researchers and practitioners who are already involved with, or who wish to know more about, this important specification language.

This book constitutes, together with its compagnion LNCS 1709, the refereed proceedings of the World Congress on Formal Methods in the Development of Computing Systems, FM'99, held in Toulouse, France in September 1999.The 92 revised full papers presented in the two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 259 paper submissions from 35 different countries. Also included are 15 abstracts describing work in progress and industrial applications. The papers are organized in topical sections. Besides five invited papers this volume contains the following sections: integration into the development process; software architecture; European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS); model checking; the B method; composition and synthesis; telecommunications; security; object-orientation; testing.