A few years ago, before The Event, I had a Mega March with lots of work travel and eventually getting sick! This year, with travel starting to feel a little safer, several in-person events happened within the same month. This March wasn’t quite as mega as the previous one, and luckily I didn’t have to leave anything early after getting ill. It was still fairly exhausting (perhaps I’m just out of practice at talking to so many people!) and was quite glad to get home.

I had intended to write this up very close to the end of March, but it’s now mid-April. What can I say? Things have been busy. Anyway, here goes.

An Office Visit

Since January I’ve been working at Maynooth University in Ireland, but living in Liverpool in the UK still. This has been mostly ok. We’ve had lots of virtual meetings and still been able to collaborate on papers. This was made a lot easier by the fact that I had worked with one of my ‘new’ colleagues for three years already! (Useful if you can arrange it.)

There are some things, however, that are easier to collaborate on if everyone is in the same room. So, I visited my office for the second time since starting this job.

It was really nice to get to see people again, and I stayed on campus so that everything was close-by. Each morning, I had a nice little walk across campus to get to the department. Oh, and some wok got done!

The outcome of being there was mainly ‘academic’ – in that we didn’t answer many of the questions we had, but we figured out some new or more detailed questions to ask. We’re pretty sure that being able to all be in the same room, doodling on the white board and chatting about the problem, made this process of refining our questions much much easier.

As I’ve said before, there are some parts of this job that can be done via a video call. But there are other parts of the job that are so much easier in person.

A Demo Day

The next event was a Demo Day/End-of-Project meeting for the RAIN Project, which was the project I was attached to for my previous post-doc job. I was invited to talk about work that I headed while I was working for that project, so off I went to Abingdon in Oxfordshire.

The work itself was a white paper providing guidance on how to develop autonomous robotic systems that will be used in hazardous environments, especially the nuclear industry. We (me, Michael, and Louise) wrote it with Steve Frost, Andy White, and Doug Styles form the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), who regulate the nuclear industry in the UK.

The white paper took a lot of effort to put together, so I was pleased to get to talk about it again. The guidelines form the main part of the work, but there is a large “Preliminaries” section that introduces some of the ideas behind the guidelines that may be new to the nuclear industry. It formed the starting point of a ‘chatty’ paper that I’ve mentioned before where I developed some of the guidance into recipes for using formal methods on autonomous and robotic systems. I’m hoping to apply these recipes, either one-by-one or all in one project, at some point in the future.

The details of the workshop my talk was part of can be found on its page on the A&V Network website, where the slides for my presentation can also be found.

The white paper is available online:

  • Luckcuck, Matt, Fisher, Michael, Dennis, Louise, Frost, Steve, White, Andy, & Styles, Doug. (2021). Principles for the Development and Assurance of Autonomous Systems for Safe Use in Hazardous Environments. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5012322

And the ‘chatty’ paper that followed on from the white paper, “Using formal methods for autonomous systems: Five recipes for formal verification” is also available:

An In-Person Conference

That’s right, an actual conference, in-person, live and in 4D.

This was the first time I’d been to a conference since before The Event, and the first in-person talk since before The Event too. I was slightly worried that I’d have forgotten how to deliver an in-person talk, but it went really well in the end.

The conference was on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2022) and it was the first time I’d attended. I thought this was going to make things a little odd; the first conference in so long, but it’s not one where I know anyone. Plus, it’s on a topic that I’ve not published in before. I have often tried to encourage the use of formal methods by telling people that “even if you just focus on the system’s requirements, that’s a great place to start”, but now I was trying to publish in a requirements engineering conference. Obviously, the paper had been accepted, but I wasn’t sure what the audience for the talk would be expecting, what sort of questions they would ask. More importantly; who would I sit with at lunch!?

It turns out that the community at REFSQ are really friendly. When I got home, I told my colleagues that it felt like being at the integrated Formal Methods conference (usually my favourite conference, because it feels more relaxed and friendly).

The paper itself is called “FRETting About Requirements: Formalised Requirements for an Aircraft Engine Controller” and is a report of our team’s experience of taking the requirements for an aircraft engine controller (given to us by our industrial partners on the VALU3S project) and encoding them into the input language of the Formal Requirements Elicitation Tool (FRET, hence the ‘FRETing’ in the title… we were having too much fun with bad puns). While not a major step forward in methodology or theory, the paper does describe what we think are the useful things about this approach and the bad parts of FRET. Some of those bad parts have become future work.

The paper is available: