Visual Programming for Spreadsheets

Speaker:        Professor Philip Cox
                Dalhousie University
                Canada

Title:          "Visual Programming for Spreadsheets"

Date:           Friday, 28 March 2014

Time:           11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Spreadsheets are arguably the most widely used programming tools in the
world. Although spreadsheet applications are routinely used for critical
applications, they are usually built by people with no software
development expertise, and as a result, most contain errors, with serious
financial and legal consequences. Various approaches have been taken to
the problem of spreadsheet correctness and robustness, including tools for
error detection, enhanced programming, and template building. L-sheets, a
recently proposed visual logic programming language, provides facilities
for spreadsheet programmers to build templates that specify the structure
and content of families of sheets. This talk describes the L-sheets
language, and discusses some of the issues that arise when L-sheets
templates are integrated into the standard spreadsheet data flow
programming model.


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Biography:

Philip Cox holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of
Waterloo. He has served as a faculty member at the Universities of
Waterloo, Toronto, Auckland, Acadia University, and Dalhousie University,
where he is presently Professor of Computer Science and Assistant Dean of
International Programs. Professor Cox is one of the founding members of
the visual languages research community. His early work in this area
resulted in Prograph, one of the first commercial software development
tools based on visual programming. He has been involved in the
organisation of many international conferences, including the IEEE
Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing, Diagrams,
Visual Languages and Computing and Visual Information Communication and
Interaction (VINCI). He is currently a member of the steering committees
of Diagrams and VINCI, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal
of Visual Languages and Computing.