Reading Group

The Formal Methods Reading Group is a group of students and faculty that meets bi-weekly to discuss papers drawn from a broad spectrum of research into formal methods, model checking, program analysis, and concurrency theory.

Here we list the reading group meetings by year (click on << or >> to shift to a different year).
Cancelled reading group meetings are indicated like this.

<< Upcoming Reading Group Meetings

none

About the Group

Papers are mostly recent, but occasionally we include an older "classic". Suggestions are welcome for papers to read. Feel free to add yourself to the mailing list; you can unsubscribe yourself at any time.

Meeting Format

Note: the text below is largely based on the description of the PARG meeting format.

The group is informal: we come together to further our understanding of the field. All group members are expected to read the paper, understand it to the best of their ability, and come to the meeting with questions and topics for discussion.

If you haven't read the paper beforehand, you are likely to get much less from the meeting, and also to contribute less to it. However, you don't have to fully understand the paper, or to be an expert in the topic! We encourage researchers of all abilities (from undergrads to faculty) to attend.

Each meeting starts with one group member (the moderator) giving a 5–10 minute overview of the paper. In some sense, moderators just share with the group the notes they made while reading the paper carefully. This sets the background for the rest of the discussion, which consists of people raising the points they noticed when they read the paper, and the group discussing those points.

Here are examples of topics that the moderator (or others) might raise.

Why the problem is interesting, and what for. Often the author assumes that the reader is in the same subfield and wants to solve the same problem ("Why else would they read the paper?") and thus that the value of the contribution should be obvious.
How it works. Often the terseness of papers causes different readers to make different assumptions about the missing details, so if you explain what yours were, we can discuss anomalies and misunderstandings as a group.
What's new about the paper. Most of the group will not have read the specific related work; the reason you chose this paper is probably because you have read the related work, or some of it—so tell us about it.
Whether you buy it or not. If you spot any problems, share them with the group: perhaps no-one else has spotted them, or perhaps others can see a solution or explain why it does in fact work.
What you would do next. If you think there is an experiment they should do to prove their technique, or to answer an interesting question, or if their algorithm could be made into a tool to solve a related problem, say so.

Suggesting Papers

Send suggestions for papers to read to the fmrg-discuss mailing list. In case you do not intend to present the paper yourself, you should consider accompanying your suggestion with the name of an alternative moderator (after first asking this person for permission, of course).

Other members of the group are encouraged to send endorsements for proposed papers to the list and pledge their attendance to the meeting.

Mailing List

Discussions about future topics, meeting dates, endorsements, etc. are sent to the fmrg-discuss mailing list. You can subscribe via a web interface, or by sending an empty email to FMRG-DISCUSS-subscribe-request@lists.utwente.nl.

If you want to review previous discussions, there are list archives available.