Crowd Actions, (Reverse) Design, and Complexity | What's Under the Hood? Recovering Specifications of Software Systems

Some prefer to view crowds as complex adaptive systems, in which case one might "reverse engineer" crowd actions to analyze the articulations and flux that changed too quickly to be captured in real time. There is a goodly amount of tension between theory and practice, though, neatly presented via another complex adaptive system: modernist narrative fiction.

This presentation by Judith Paltin compares conventional analytical approaches to two famous crowd actions, the Irish Easter Rising (1916) and the London Battle at Cable Street (1936), to roughly contemporaneous fictional representations of crowd movements and collective mental states.

Software runs the world. It determines whether or not you have a particular disease, the paths of airplanes across the sky, and who wins the national election. Much of our daily life is wrapped up in software, yet most software comes with no assurance that it will work, or that it works as expected. In this talk, Ivan Beschastnikh will discuss a research area in software engineering that concerns itself with reverse engineering of software specifications. The aim is to recover a blueprint of the software that will tell us how the software operates. The guiding question for this area of research is whether it is possible (or desirable) to completely formulate properties of software before the software is constructed. According to traditional engineering principles the answer is almost always ‘yes.’ Modern software practices indicate that the answer is often ‘no.’