Title: Grammar Inference Technology Applications in Software Engineering
Speaker: Prof. Barrett Bryant,
Software Composition and Modeling Laboratory
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Time:  10:00am, Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Venue: Lecture room, Lab for Computer Science, Level 3 Building #5, Institute of Software, CAS

Abstract:
There are many problems whose solutions take the form of patterns that may be expressed using grammars (e.g., speech recognition, text processing, genetic sequencing, programming language development, etc.). Construction of these grammars is usually carried out by computer scientists working with domain experts.  Grammar inference (GI) is the process of learning a grammar from examples, either positive (i.e., the pattern should be recognized by the grammar) and/or negative (i.e., the pattern should not be recognized by the grammar).  This talk will present the application of grammar inference to software engineering, including recovery of domain-specific language (DSL) specifications from example DSL programs and recovery of a meta model from instance models which have evolved independently of the original meta model. Further details are available at http://www.cis.uab.edu/softcom/GrammarInference.

Bio:
Barrett R. Bryant is Professor and Associate Chair of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research interests include theory and implementation of programming languages, formal specification of software systems, and component-based software engineering, and he has authored or co-authored over 120 published papers in these areas. He is a member of EAPLS, a senior member of ACM and IEEE. Further details are available at http://www.cis.uab.edu/bryant.