Stanford Seminar - The Human Factors of Formal Methods

April 19, 2024
Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University
As formal methods 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 artifacts without extensive formal training. However, realizing 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 find misconceptions suffered by users, how technically appealing designs that experts may value may fail to help, and how our tools may even mislead users.
About the speaker:
Shriram is the Vice President for Programming Languages at Brown University in Providence, RI, USA. He's not, really, but that's what it says on his business card. At heart, he's a person of ill-repute: a Schemer, Racketeer, and Pyreteer. He believes tropical fruit are superior to all other kinds. He is terrified of success, because he may be forced to buy a suit. On a more serious note, he's a professor at Brown who has created several influential systems (such as DrRacket, Margrave, Flapjax, and Lambda-JS) and written multiple widely-used books. He 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 other recognitions.
More about the course can be found here: hci.stanford.edu/seminar/
View the entire CS547 Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Seminar playlist: • Stanford CS547 - Human...
► Check out the entire catalog of courses and programs available through Stanford Online: online.stanford.edu/explore