Welcome to the Foretellix blog. Here is a short introduction:
My name is Yoav Hollander. I have been doing verification practically forever [1] (e.g. I created the e verification language).
By “verification” I mean here roughly “the process of finding bugs (or unintended consequences) in engineered systems before they annoy a customer / destroy a project / kill somebody”.
Foretellix is trying to investigate how dynamic, constrained-random, coverage-driven verification (let’s call it “CDV” – this is the bread-and-butter of hardware verification) can be extended for verifying complex socio-technical systems.[2]
Just how Foretellix will go about achieving this is still work-in-progress (motto: “So deep in stealth mode even we are not quite sure what we are doing”).
I have been investigating this field (“big-system-verification”) for a while now. A few weeks ago I decided to attend the Autonomous Vehicle Test & Development Symposium in Stuttgart. I sent my trip report to a whole bunch of people, and was pleasantly surprised by the thoughtful feedback I got in replies (some of it summarized here).
So I decided to write this blog, as a tool for clarifying my thoughts, entertaining my readers, and (mainly) for getting feedback. See also the topics page and the terminology page.
So:
- Please comment directly in the blog. This is supposed to be very interdisciplinary, open and friendly. Feel free to go in any related direction.
- If you want to contact me privately, just email yoav.hollander at gmail.com
- Please forward this blog to anybody else who might be interested. We may also have some guest posts from time to time.
- I will not be collecting any email addresses, sending any requests, posting any ads or anything like that
Have fun – hope you’ll enjoy the conversation. Remember: verification is really tough, but really important.
And it can be fun. For now, let’s keep the tone light (until I get serious corporate lawyers who will request the removal of all jokes and mourn the fact that web archives are forever). Let me end this post with the obligatory Nathaniel Borenstein quote:
“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents”
Notes
[1] Since the early bronze age.
[2] Here is some (old’ish) background on what Foretellix is trying to do (e.g. look at the FAQ).
The picture below shows the audacious scale of what this blog is about:
