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Keynote - John Mylopoulos

John Mylopolous

(8:30-9:30) "A Refinement Calculus for Requirements Engineering"
(presentation)
The requirements problem consists of transforming stakeholder requirements - however informal, ambiguous, conflicting, unattainable, imprecise and incomplete - into a consistent, complete and realizable specification through a systematic process. We propose a refinement calculus for requirements engineering (CaRE) for addressing this problem, inspired by the typically dialectical nature of requirements activities. The calculus casts the requirement problem as an iterative argument between stakeholders and requirements engineers, where posited requirements are attacked for being ambiguous, incomplete, etc. and refined into new requirements that address the defect pointed out by each attack. Refinements are carried out by operators provided by CaRE that refine (e.g., strengthen, weaken, decompose) attacked requirements to build a refinement graph. The semantics of refinement graphs is based on the notion of acceptable argument in Dung's argumentation theory.

This is joint work with Yehia ElRakaiby, Alessio Ferrari and Alex Borgida.

Professor John Mylopoulos is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa. He received his BEng degree from Brown University in 1966 and his PhD degree from Princeton in 1970, the year he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto. His research interests include requirements engineering, data semantics and knowledge management. He retired from Toronto in 2009, and joined the University of Trento (Italy) where he led a large European project on Software Engineering (2011-16).

John Mylopoulos is the recipient of the first Outstanding Services Award given by the Canadian AI Society (1992), a co-recipient of the most influential paper award of the 1994 International Conference on Software Engineering, a fellow of the American Association for AI (AAAI), the elected president of the VLDB Endowment (1998-01, re-elected for the period 2002-05), and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

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