We report on our initial experience exploring Mizar and Isabelle, two quite different systems that support constructing and checking mathematical proofs. We also discuss some issues in the design of such systems.

The emergence of small portable computers and the advances in wireless networking have made mobile computing today a reality. Information systems and databases are among the applications that make mobile computing attractive. While the topic of querying data in wireless and mobile systems has received a lot of attention, techniques to eeciently update data in these systems while providing trans...

Formal methods can signiicantly assist in the design and modelling of safety-critical systems. However, formal methods are frequently criticised as being unusable through being too complex and requiring expert knowledge to use. We assert that to make formal methods usable they must be able to be presented in a manner which is readily interpretable. However, we must ensure that the inferences wh...

Current approaches to component-based systems development do not adequately capture high-level knowledge about component provided and required services for use during design, implementation and runtime deployment. We describe a new approach to engineering such systems that characterises components by the various "aspects" of the overall system each component provides to or requires from end use...

An action scheme is proposed that reflects the cooperation with other autonomous database systems and other models of data repositories like file systems or object stores. It is provided by the operating system level to support this kind of heterogeneity. Its key feature is that the provided mechanisms for recoverability are designed in an orthogonal manner meaning that it is not presupposed to...

Future applications of virtual reality will require increasingly complicated virtual worlds to yield the richness and functionality demanded by increasing numbers of users. This document introduces some qualitative measures of complexity which may be used to asses virtual reality systems. A number of current virtual reality systems are considered with regard to the facilities and complexity whi...

Developing an efficient server-based real-time scheduling solution that supports dynamic task-level parallelism is now relevant to even the desktop and embedded domains and no longer only to the high performance computing market niche. This paper proposes a novel approach that combines the constantbandwidth server abstraction with a work-stealing load balancing scheme which, while ensuring isol...

Development of complex systems often requires building a large number of models with many interconnections and dependencies among them. The success of a project can be compromised by cognitive overload or limits of developers, who might miss relationships between elements of the models. Developing Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is a typical example of where this may occur. Despite of its potential, ...