CSE Teaching Committee, Minutes for Meeting, 27 October 2006

1. Previous minutes and issues arising from them - Jingling Xue
2. New Course Proposal High Assurance Computing - Manuel Chakravarty

   Approved in principle subject to:

   • Modifying the handbook entry to make it consistent with the proposed syllabus (i.e., the course's emphasis on program quality, correctness, reliability and safety).
   • Possibly finding a new title to reflect better the nature of the course.
   • Evaluating further whether COMP3161 should be used as a pre-requisite or not.
   • Discussing with Richard Buckland to optimise the interface between this and Richard's course on security.

   This new course will replace the existing COMP4132 Advanced Functional Programming.

   Jingling presented the proposal on Manuel's behalf.

   Manuel's responses on 30 October 2006:

   • Revised handbook entry:

       Trust in the safety and security of software systems is increasingly
       important with the use of software in systems where failure or sabotage can
       lead to loss of life or be very expensive (this includes medical and
       financial applications as well as software use for power grids, mass
       transport systems, and security infrastructure).  This courses covers
       language-based safety engineering techniques including advanced type
       systems, formal reasoning, encapsulation of side effects,
       specification-based test generators, domain specific languages, and
       prototyping for high-assurance.  It demonstrates at concrete examples,
       including security infrastructure software, how modern functional languages
       are used to achieve high assurance and conveys hands on experience by
       practical assignments.
     

   • New title: Language-Based Software Safety
   • Pre-requisite: None
   • Comment:

     The relationship to Richard's course is such that Richard teaches about
     security infrastructure (eg, specific cypto algorithms), whereas I teach
     about language-based methods to ease and increase the trust in the
     implementation of such infrastructure (eg, domain specific languages,
     such as Cryptol).  So, both are perfectly orthogonal, but still both are
     concerned with security.
     

3. Future directions in CSE curricula
   (Computer forensics? Games development? Service-oriented computing?)

   All three directions or specialisation areas (with the CS program?) were discussed quite intensively. It was noted that some universities such as QUT offer a degree called the Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment. Courses on computer forensics are also available elsewhere.

   Action: Richard to prepare a proposal for Computer forensics. (accepted)
   Action: Malcolm to prepare a proposal for Games development. (accepted)
   Action: Helen to prepare a proposal for Service-Oriented Computing. (accepted)

   Richard, Malcolm and Helen are expected to report their findings at the next TC meeting.