TCS Excellence in Computer Science (TECS) Week 2004
 January 5–9 2004, TRDDC, Pune
The second TCS Excellence in Computer Science Week 2004 (TECS Week 2004) was held at TRDDC, Pune from 5–9 January 2004. The theme for TECS Week 2004 was ‘Specification Techniques’, a field with a rich theory and many practical applications having high industrial relevance and growing scientific interest in the formalization of such technologies. The course covered material on UML and other industrial notations, as well as solutions to the general problems of specification, model checking and verification of large program models constructed using such notations.

Prof. Sir Tony Hoare, FRS, being felicitated by TCS CEO S. Ramadorai on the occasion of
TECS Week 2004

Workshop
Dr. Jean-Raymond Abrial, France presented a formalism, derived from the B Method and from the Action System formalisms, for capturing and refining requirements into implementation. 

Prof. David Harel, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel, presented a ‘Play-in Play-out’ approach for capturing scenarios of a reactive system. The ‘Play-in’ captures use case scenarios of a reactive system from which the ‘Play engine’ automatically generates Live Sequence Charts (LSC). The ‘Play-out’ executes these LSCs to validate the requirements. The approach was demonstrated with a biological system as an example. 

Dr. Leslie Lamport, Microsoft Research, USA, presented Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA) as a formalism for specifying and reasoning about concurrent systems. TLC, a model checker for TLA, was introduced as a tool for verifying TLA specifications.

Prof. Bran Selic, Principal Engineer, IBM Software Group – Rational Software, Canada, gave an overview of UML 2.0 and its design rationale. The concepts of model-driven architecture (MDA), model-driven engineering (MDE) and real-time profile were also discussed. 

Professor Sir Tony Hoare, FRS, Microsoft Research, UK, in his keynote address, presented a 15-year international collaborative research program called ‘verifying compiler’ as a grand challenge to the computing research community. Unlike a traditional compiler, a verifying compiler also checks a program for its correctness and other semantic properties of interest.


Prof. Tony Hoare, who delivered the TRDDC distinguished lecture with Prof Mathai Joseph, Executive Director, TRDDC

TRDDC Distinguished Lecture
Prof. Tony Hoare

Professor Sir Tony Hoare, FRS, also gave the TRDDC distinguished lecture on 'Grand Challenges for Computing Research' on January 8, 2004. CEO S. Ramadorai was present for the talk and felicitated Prof. Sir Tony Hoare in the true Indian tradition.TECS Week 2004 provided us with an opportunity to present our work on model-driven development and requirements specification, and interact with leading experts in the field on a one-on-one basis.

Participation and Response
Participation at TECS Week 2004 was open to any interested person with a background in Computer Science from India and neighbouring countries. Of the 78 participants, 26 were from TCS, the rest were post-graduate, and research students, faculty and young professionals from research institutions and industry. Of these, there were six participants from abroad.

Most participants felt that this was one of the best workshops they had ever attended. TECS Week 2004 provided a rare opportunity for the leading researchers in different areas of specification techniques to come together and exchange views and ideas. The interactions were lively and quite enriching for all concerned.