The Deductive Spreadsheet

This book describes recent multidisciplinary research at the confluence of the fields of logic programming, database theory and human-computer interaction. The goal of this effort was to develop the basis of a deductive spreadsheet, a user productivity application that allows users without formal training in computer science to make decisions about generic data in the same simple way they currently use spreadsheets to make decisions about numerical data. The result is an elegant design supported by the most recent developments in the above disciplines.

The first half of the book focuses on the deductive engine that underlies this application, the foundations that users do not see. After giving a mathematical model of traditional spreadsheet applications, we extend them with operators to perform a number of relational tasks, similar to the user view of a database but in a spreadsheet context. Expressing this extension in a logic programming framework is a natural step towards giving it powerful deductive capabilities. The second half of the book deals with the user interface, the part of the application with which the user actually interacts. We review the elements of the graphical user interface of traditional spreadsheet applications and describe practical methodologies for designing user interfaces borrowed from the field of cognitive psychology. We then propose a design that conservatively integrates mechanisms for a user to take advantage of the new deductive capabilities. This is followed by the results of some preliminary usability experiments.

Iliano Cervesato is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Qatar campus of Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches principles of programming languages, logic and computer security. He has held appointments at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he performed his doctoral work, Stanford University, Princeton University, and Tulane University. He also worked for ITT Industries at the Naval Research Laboratory. Before moving to Qatar, he was the founder and chief research scientist of Deductive Solutions in Annandale, Virginia. His research interests encompass computational logic, programming languages, computer security, and user productivity applications.

He holds a B.Sc. in computer science from the University of Udine in Italy; an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Houston in the US; and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Torino in Italy.

Dr. Cervesato has over 15 years of experience in computational logic and in various aspects of the design, analysis, and implementation of programming languages. He also has over a decade of research and development experience in computer security, notably cryptographic protocol analysis and the foundations of computer security. His expertise and contributions are internationally recognized. He has published over 100 articles on the above topics. He has been the program chair or general chair of several international scientific conferences.