The Law of Tendency to Executability and its Implications
- When?
- Wednesday 6 April 2011, 14:00 to 15:00
- Where?
- 39BB02
- Open to:
- Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Professor Mark Harman, University College London
The Law of Tendency to Executability states that all useful descriptions of processes have a tendency towards executability. Attempts to rise above the perceived low abstraction level of executable code can produce increased expressive power, but the notations they engender have a tendency to become executable. This has many consequences for software; its creation, evolution and deployment. It also has wider implications. The automation that drives this tendency also raises fundamental questions about how human decision making can remain inside the execution loop.
Mark Harman is Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at University College London where he directs the CREST centre. He is widely known for work on source code analysis and testing and was instrumental in the founding of the field of Search Based Software Engineering, a field that currently has active researchers in 24 countries and for which he has given 16 keynote talks.