This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. It relates to the III Annual Conference hosted by the Russian Federal Ministry of Education and Science in December 2016. This event has summarized, analyzed and discussed the interim results, academic outputs and scientific achievements of the Russian Federal Targeted Programme for Research and Development in priority areas of development of the Russian Scientific and Technological Complex for 2014-2020. It contains 75 selected papers from 6 areas considered priority by the Federal programme: computer science, ecology & environment sciences; energy and energy efficiency; life sciences; nanoscience & nanotechnology; and transport & communications. The chapters report the results of the 3-years research projects supported by the Programme and finalized in 2016.

This open access two-volume set LNCS 10980 and 10981 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2018, held in Oxford, UK, in July 2018. The 52 full and 13 tool papers presented together with 3 invited papers and 2 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 215 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and techniques, from algorithmic and logical foundations of verication to practical applications in distributed, networked, cyber-physical, and autonomous systems. They are organized in topical sections on model checking, program analysis using polyhedra, synthesis, learning, runtime verification, hybrid and timed systems, tools, probabilistic systems, static analysis, theory and security, SAT, SMT and decisions procedures, concurrency, and CPS, hardware, industrial applications.

Workflow graphs extend classical flow charts with concurrent fork and join nodes. They constitute the core of business processing languages such as BPMN or UML Activity Diagrams. The activities of a workflow graph are executed by humans or machines, generically called resources. If concurrent activities cannot be executed in parallel by lack of resources, the time needed to execute the workflow increases. We study the problem of computing the minimal number of resources necessary to fully exploit the concurrency of a given workflow, and execute it as fast as possible (i.e., as fast as with unlimited resources). We model this problem using free-choice Petri nets, which are known to be equivalent to workflow graphs. We analyze the computational complexity of two versions of the problem: computing the resource and concurrency thresholds. We use the results to design an algorithm to approximate the concurrency threshold, and evaluate it on a benchmark suite of 642 industrial examples. We show that it performs very well in practice: It always provides the exact value, and never takes more than 30 ms for any workflow, even for those with a huge number of reachable markings.

Big data is closely linked to the new, old question of data quality. Whoever pursues a new research perspective such as big data and wants to zero out irrelevant data is confronted with questions of data quality. Therefore, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires data processors to meet data quality standards; in case of non-compliance, severe penalties can be imposed. But what does data quality actually mean? And how does the quality requirement fit into the dogmatic systems of civil and data protection law?

This open access book examines how the social sciences can be integrated into the praxis of engineering and science, presenting unique perspectives on the interplay between engineering and social science. Motivated by the report by the Commission on Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Association of Arts and Sciences, which emphasizes the importance of social sciences and Humanities in technical fields, the essays and papers collected in this book were presented at the NSF-funded workshop ‘Engineering a Better Future: Interplay between Engineering, Social Sciences and Innovation’, which brought together a singular collection of people, topics and disciplines. The book is split into three parts: A. Meeting at the Middle: Challenges to educating at the boundaries covers experiments in combining engineering education and the social sciences; B. Engineers Shaping Human Affairs: Investigating the interaction between social sciences and engineering, including the cult of innovation, politics of engineering, engineering design and future of societies; and C. Engineering the Engineers: Investigates thinking about design with papers on the art and science of science and engineering practice.