Seminar: Causality in Systems

Seminar: Causality in Systems

Talk on "How to seminar": Thursday, May 3, 15:15, PZ901 (mandatory!)

Organizational meeting on seminars and projects: Thursday, April 26, 15:15, PZ901

Schedule

• Seminar (Prof. Dr. Stefan Leue,  Dr. Georgiana Caltais)
  Thursday  15:15 - 16:45  Room: PZ 901

Prerequesites

 (Temporal) Logics, Formal Verification (e.g., Model Checking), Algorithms.
The seminar will be held in English.

  Contents

Determining and computing causalities is a frequently addressed issue in the philosophy of science and engineering, for instance when causally relating system faults to system failures.  A notion of causality that is frequently used in relation to technical systems relies on counterfactual reasoning. In short, the counterfactual argument, which specifies when an event is considered a cause for some effect, is defined in the following way: a) whenever the event presumed to be a cause occurs, the effect occurs as well, and b) when the presumed cause does not occur, the effect will not occur either. Hence, counterfactual reasoning requires the consideration of alternative worlds: one world, corresponding to one program or system execution in software and systems analysis, where both the cause and the effect occur, and another world in which neither the cause nor the effect occur. Cause and effect are assumed to be temporally ordered.
Apart from the related theoretical challenges when formulating the “right” notion of causality, special emphasis is put on algorithms and practical tools for automatically identifying causalities. Such tools can serve as debugging tools, and can provide the engineer with the necessary insight for understanding what caused a certain system failure.

Learning objectives

The seminar will help the participants to enter the domain of causality checking, to understand the main challenges and the applicability in real world scenarios. Causal reasoning is a hot research topic in Computer Science. Hence, the current seminar can serve the participants as a starting point for this research direction as well.

Course literature

Research papers / book chapters on the topic of causality checking methodologies for Computer Science.
All materials will be made available via ilias (link).

Expected course achievement

30 Minutes Presentation + 15 Minutes Discussion 
Written report (8-10 pages)

Participants

Master-level course. Open to Bachelor-level students.

Remark

The course will be taught in English. All course materials will be in English.

 Credits

2 SWS
4 ECTS-Points