CSE Teaching Committee, Minutes for Meeting, 27 October 2006


The meeting was opened at 2.15pm.
Present: Jingling Xue (chair), Kai Engelhardt, Bruno Gaeta, Brad Hall, Rex Kwok, Michael Lake, Sri Parameswaran, Rupert Shuttleworth
Apologies: John Shepherd

  1. Previous minutes and issues arising from them - Jingling Xue
  2. New Course Proposal High Assurance Computing - Manuel Chakravarty

    Approved in principle subject to:

    This new course will replace the existing COMP4132 Advanced Functional Programming.

    Jingling presented the proposal on Manuel's behalf.

    Manuel's responses on 30 October 2006:

    • Revised handbook entry:
        Trust in the safety and security of software systems is increasingly
        important with the use of software in systems where failure or sabotage can
        lead to loss of life or be very expensive (this includes medical and
        financial applications as well as software use for power grids, mass
        transport systems, and security infrastructure).  This courses covers
        language-based safety engineering techniques including advanced type
        systems, formal reasoning, encapsulation of side effects,
        specification-based test generators, domain specific languages, and
        prototyping for high-assurance.  It demonstrates at concrete examples,
        including security infrastructure software, how modern functional languages
        are used to achieve high assurance and conveys hands on experience by
        practical assignments.
      
    • New title: Language-Based Software Safety
    • Pre-requisite: None
    • Comment:
      The relationship to Richard's course is such that Richard teaches about
      security infrastructure (eg, specific cypto algorithms), whereas I teach
      about language-based methods to ease and increase the trust in the
      implementation of such infrastructure (eg, domain specific languages,
      such as Cryptol).  So, both are perfectly orthogonal, but still both are
      concerned with security.
      

  3. Future directions in CSE curricula
    (Computer forensics? Games development? Service-oriented computing?)

    All three directions or specialisation areas (with the CS program?) were discussed quite intensively. It was noted that some universities such as QUT offer a degree called the Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment. Courses on computer forensics are also available elsewhere.

    Action: Richard to prepare a proposal for Computer forensics. (accepted)
    Action: Malcolm to prepare a proposal for Games development. (accepted)
    Action: Helen to prepare a proposal for Service-Oriented Computing. (accepted)

    Richard, Malcolm and Helen are expected to report their findings at the next TC meeting.


The meeting closed at 3:20pm.

School of Computer Science & Engineering
The University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052, AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 2 9385 6876

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