Eighth Meeting (2021/6/14)

Minutes

Jun 14, 2021 Meetings

Present at the meeting: Kenji, Graeme, Catherine, Brijesh, Alexandra, Joao, Leila, Luigia

Minutes

  1. Teaching Committee so far: FME has changed the rules of its committees, the length of one term is now 3 years and we are now in our second term. In the summer of 2023, there will be a question of whether we continue in this team or not - we will wonder when it comes. Here is what we have achieved so far (in the meeting we agreed on these contributions):
  • FMTea workshop –> we revived it and it goes very nicely
  • the Formal Methods courses database –> as above
  • we have a nice webpage where we collected many of our thoughts about what this committee should be working on
  • we have applied (unsuccessfully so far) to a COST action

Related to the FME rules, they (vaguely) suggest there should be 4 meetings per year, and we had in average 2 meetings per year, so we might meet once per season if everyone is ok with it

  1. Alexandra and Joao informed us about FMTea’s status
  • Tobias Nipkow –> invited speaker
  • one more confirmed tutorial speaker
  • a third tutorial speaker needed –> we discussed Laura Kovacs and her automated approach to generate personalised exams
  • submission deadline: July 2, probably to be prolonged with 2 more weeks
  • more publicity needed
  1. COST application - rejected, but we agreed to try once more; next deadline at the end of October
  • we discussed a bit the comments we received from the reviewers and we will start a new iteration from there in a separate email we will discuss these comments with the people involved (this meeting summary will go into our webpage, so this is not the place to add the comments)
  1. What do we do next
  • we decided to start a tutorial series on teaching formal methods –> thanks Brijesh for the excellent suggestion! monthly (or every other week, depending on the availability of speakers; we decided to start monthly) online
    • start with the FMTea19 participants, see if we can convince people to discuss their approaches
    • record the sessions if the speaker agrees and upload them in the webpage
  • we need to recheck the courses database, to see if courses are still up to date
    • possibly recheck our countries for FM courses if we get to it
  1. on the would-be-nice-to-do list
  • organise (establish) a training school
    • main question here: what is the level, beginner or advanced?
  • each of us makes a video of our favorite formal method (a la Lamport’s teaching of TLA+)
  • collect interesting papers and materials (we have a section in the webpage for inspiration)
  • we wanted to collect exams, solutions, case studies (simple ones, as the complex case studies are handled by the Industry Committee; proof-of-concept) –> we can upload them in the webpage

The aim of the FME Teaching Committee is to support a worldwide improvement in learning formal methods, mainly by teaching but also via self-learning.