Causality and Responsibility for Formal Verification and Beyond

Abstract: The theory of actual causality, defined by Halpern and Pearl, and its quantitative measure - the degree of responsibility - was shown to be extremely useful in various areas of computer science due to a good match between the results it produces and our intuition. In this paper, I describe the applications of causality to formal verification, namely, explanation of counterexamples, refinement of coverage metrics, and symbolic trajectory evaluation. I also briefly discuss recent applications of causality to legal reasoning.