BCS-FACS

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BCS-FACS is the British Computer Society Formal Aspects of Computing Science Specialist Group. The group, founded in 1978, organizes meetings for its members and others on formal methods and related computer science topics. There is an associated journal, Formal Aspects of Computing, published by Springer, and a more informal FACS FACTS newsletter.

The group celebrated its 20th anniversary with a meeting at the Royal Society in London in 1998, with presentations by four eminent computer scientists, Mike Gordon, Tony Hoare, Robin Milner and Gordon Plotkin, all Fellows of the Royal Society.

Since 2002, the Chair of BCS-FACS has been Jonathan Bowen. In December of that year, BCS-FACS organized a conference on the Formal Aspects of Security (FASec'02) at Royal Holloway, University of London [1]. In 2004, FACS organized a major event at London South Bank University to celebrate its own 25th anniversary and also 25 Years of CSP (CSP25), attended by the origination of CSP, Sir Tony Hoare, and others in the field [2].

The group liaises with other related groups such as the Centre for Software Reliability, Formal Methods Europe, the London Mathematical Society Computer Committee and the Z User Group. It has held joint meetings with other BCS specialist groups such as the Advanced Programming Group and BCSWomen.

FACS sponsors and supports meetings, such as the Refinement Workshop [3]. It often holds a Christmas event each year, with a theme related to formal aspects of computing (for example, teaching formal methods [4]). It recent years, a series of evening seminars have been held, mainly at the BCS London office. Speakers have included leading computer scientists, mainly from the UK but some from abroad, including Samson Abramsky, Jean-Raymond Abrial (France/Switzerland), Dines Bjørner (Denmark), Richard Bornat, Egon Börger (Italy), Muffy Caulder, Michael Butler, Martin Henson, Anthony Hall, Jane Hillston, Michael Jackson, Cliff Jones, Tom Maibaum, Ursula Martin, Peter Mosses, Ben Moszkowski, Steve Reeves (New Zealand), Peter Ryan, among others.

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[edit] References

  1. ^ Ali E. Abdallah, Peter Ryan and Steve Schneider (editors), Formal Aspects of Security. Springer Science+Business Media, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2629, 2003. ISBN 3-540-20693-0.
  2. ^ Ali E. Abdallah, Cliff B. Jones and Jeff W. Sanders (editors), Communicating Sequential Processes: The First 25 Years. Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3525, 2005. ISBN 3-540-25813-2.
  3. ^ John Derrick, Eerke Boiten, Jim Woodcock and Joakim von Wright (editors), REFINE 2002: The BCS FACS Refinement Workshop. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 70(3). Elsevier Science Publishers, July 2002.
  4. ^ Paul Boca, Jonathan P. Bowen and David A. Duce (editors), Teaching Formal Methods: Practice and Experience, BCS London Office, UK, 15 December 2006. Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC), BCS, 2006.

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