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Annual Morley Distinguished Seminar

The School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences hosts the sixth annual Distinguished Morley Seminar ‘When to trust a self-driving car…’, which will be given by Professor Marta Kwiatkowska, Professor of Computing Systems and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford. The lecture will be held on Monday 26 November 2018 at 14:00 in the Ditchburn Lecture Theatre, JJ-Thomson Building.

Computing devices support us in almost all everyday tasks, from mobile phones and online banking to wearable and implantable medical devices. We are now experimenting with self-driving cars and robots.  Since embedded software at the heart of these devices must behave correctly in presence of uncertainty, probabilistic verification techniques have been developed to guarantee their safety, reliability and resource efficiency.

Using illustrative examples, this lecture will give an overview of the role that probabilistic modelling and verification can play in a variety of applications, including security, medical devices, self-driving cars and DNA computing. It will also describe recent developments towards model synthesis, which aims to build these systems so that they are correct by construction. Finally, it will explore the problems of ensuring that systems that rely on learning will behave correctly, both in situations that they have seen in training, and in situations that they haven’t.

The School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences annual lecture series is named after Edith Morley, who was the first woman to be appointed a University professor in the UK, in 1908 at University College, Reading, which became the University of Reading in 1926.