Getting started

I have commenced my "master plan" to finally finish my Master's thesis. I will be in regular contact with Roger to ensure that I make steady progress and I will be making daily blog entries summarizing what I've done. With any luck, this will keep me on pace to finish by August, or by the end of the year at worst.

My first goal is to go over my accumulated research and write up a summary of my thesis topic and where I'd like to go with it. I need to have that done and mailed to Roger by January 15. That will serve as my jumping off point to direct further research and build an outline.

To that end, today I started going through the collection of research papers I've accumulated. Lots of them of PDF files culled from the internet or from the online archives of the ACM and IEEE.

Right now, I'm going through the papers and starting to map them out using KDissert, a KDE-based mind-mapping tool designed for helping students create documents like dissertations and theses. I'm currently in the process of creating nodes for all my documents. I'm adding the titles, a link to the file, and a very brief abstract of the topic of the paper. I'll post the the map when I get everything added.

I didn't have too long to work today, so I only got through 15 documents. I've probably got at least 50, not counting the ones on paper. Today's selection included:

  1. Four general discussion/survey articles on formal methods.
  2. Four academic articles on various types of formal semantics.
  3. Tony Hoare's Turing Award lecture (don't know how that got filed with the research....)
  4. Three case-studies on applications of formal methods.
  5. A formal verification of a Java compiler.
  6. Something I didn't really understand that relates to using axioms for JUnit testing.
  7. An axiomatic semantics of an object-oriented language that supports aliases.

I should probably post the actual article names and authors for future reference, but it's late and I have to get up for work in the morning. I'll continue to list tomorrow.

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