Stefania Gnesi was born in Livorno in 1954. She studied Computer Science at the University of Pisa, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1978. During her studies at ISI, which was the University of Pisa’s Institute for Computer Science, a young discipline at that time, Stefania became interested in the continuing challenge associated with the production of software, namely to demonstrate that the developed software is actually doing what is expected to do, a challenge made harder in many cases by the fact that the expectations themselves are not precisely expressed. This has kept her busy ever since. To face this challenge her very first steps in research, towards the end of her university studies, of purely theoretical nature, proved very valuable. In a publication in the Journal of the ACM [63] (not bad for a first journal paper!), resulting from her thesis under the supervision of Prof. Ugo Montanari, it is shown that finding the solution of a dynamic programming problem in the form of polyadic functional equations is equivalent to searching a minimal cost path in an and/or graph with monotone cost functions. An important computational application of this result is that the solution of a system of functional equations can always be reduced to the problem of searching a minimal cost solution tree in an and/or graph.
The Legacy of Stefania Gnesi: From Software Engineering to Formal Methods and Tools, and Back
Fantechi A.;Semini L.
2019-01-01
Abstract
Stefania Gnesi was born in Livorno in 1954. She studied Computer Science at the University of Pisa, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1978. During her studies at ISI, which was the University of Pisa’s Institute for Computer Science, a young discipline at that time, Stefania became interested in the continuing challenge associated with the production of software, namely to demonstrate that the developed software is actually doing what is expected to do, a challenge made harder in many cases by the fact that the expectations themselves are not precisely expressed. This has kept her busy ever since. To face this challenge her very first steps in research, towards the end of her university studies, of purely theoretical nature, proved very valuable. In a publication in the Journal of the ACM [63] (not bad for a first journal paper!), resulting from her thesis under the supervision of Prof. Ugo Montanari, it is shown that finding the solution of a dynamic programming problem in the form of polyadic functional equations is equivalent to searching a minimal cost path in an and/or graph with monotone cost functions. An important computational application of this result is that the solution of a system of functional equations can always be reduced to the problem of searching a minimal cost solution tree in an and/or graph.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
