FORTE 2017 - Call for Papers

37th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems

Scope

FORTE 2017 is a forum for fundamental research on theory, models, tools, and applications for distributed systems. The conference solicits original contributions that advance the science and technologies for distributed systems, with special interest in the areas of:

  • Component- and model-based design
  • Object technology, modularity, software adaptation
  • Service-oriented, ubiquitous, pervasive, grid, cloud, and mobile computing systems
  • Software quality, reliability, availability, and safety;
  • Security, privacy, and trust in distributed systems;
  • Adaptive distributed systems, self-stabilization;
  • Self-healing/organizing;
  • Verification, validation, formal analysis, and testing of the above.

Contributions that combine theory and practice and that exploit formal methods and theoretical foundations to present novel solutions to problems arising from the development of distributed systems are encouraged. FORTE covers distributed computing models and formal specification, testing and verification methods. The application domains include all kinds of application-level distributed systems, telecommunication services, Internet, embedded and real-time systems, as well as networking and communication security and reliability.

Keynote Speaker

FORTE 2017 has the pleasure to have a keynote presentation by Dr Rupak Majumdar (MPI, Germany). 

Bio:

Rupak Majumdar is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. His research interests are in the verification and control of cyber-physical systems, software verification and program analysis, logic, and automata theory.
Dr. Majumdar received the President's Gold Medal from IIT, Kanpur, the Leon O. Chua award from UC Berkeley, an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an ERC Synergy award, "Most Influential Paper" awards from PLDI and POPL, and several best paper awards.
He received the B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Title:

Systematic Testing for Asynchronous Programs

Abstract:

Asynchronous programming is a generic term for concurrent programming with co-operative task management and shows up in many different applications.
For example, many programming models for the web, smartphone and cloud-backed applications, server applications, and embedded systems implement programming in this style. In all these scenarios, while programs can be very efficient, the manual management of resources and asynchronous procedures can make programming quite difficult.
The natural control flow of a task is obscured and the programmer must ensure correct behavior for all possible orderings of external events.
Specifically, the global state of the program can change between the time an asynchronous procedure is posted and the time the scheduler picks and runs it.
In this talk, I will describe algorithmic analysis techniques for systematic testing of asynchronous programs. I will talk about formal models for asynchronous programs and verification and systematic testing techniques for these models.
The results will use connections between asynchronous programs and classical concurrency models such as Petri nets, partial order reductions for asynchronous programs, as well as combinatorial constructions of small test suites with formal guarantees of coverage.

Main topics of interest

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Languages and semantic foundations: new modeling and language concepts for distribution and concurrency, semantics for different types of languages, including programming languages, modeling languages, and domain-specific languages; real-time and probability aspects;
  • Formal methods and techniques: design, specification, analysis, verification, validation, testing and runtime verification of various types of distributed systems including communications and network protocols, service-oriented systems, adaptive distributed systems, cyber-physical systems and sensor networks;
  • Foundations of security: new principles for qualitative and quantitative security analysis of distributed systems, including formal models based on probabilistic concepts;
  • Applications of formal methods: applying formal methods and techniques for studying quality, reliability, availability, and safety of distributed systems;
  • Practical experience with formal methods: industrial applications, case studies and software tools for applying formal methods and description techniques to the development and analysis of real distributed systems.

Submission and publication

Contributions must be written in English and report on original, unpublished work, not submitted for publication elsewhere (cf. IFIP’s codes of conduct). The submissions must be prepared using Springer’s LNCS style. Submissions not adhering to the specified constraints may be rejected without review. Papers must be submitted electronically in pdf via the FORTE’17 interface of the EasyChair system (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=forte2017).

We solicit four kinds of submissions:

  • Full papers (up to 15 pages): Describing thorough and complete research results, tools or experience reports.
  • Short papers (up to 7 pages): Describing research results that are not fully developed, or manifestos, calls to action, personal views on FORTE related research, on the current state of the art, or on prospects for the years to come.
  • Tool demonstration papers (up to 7 pages): focus on the usage aspects of tools. Theoretical foundations and experimental evaluation are not required, however, a motivation as to why the tool is interesting and significant should be provided. Papers may have an appendix of up to 5 additional pages with details on the actual demonstration.
  • Posters (up to 3 pages): Students can submit descriptions of posters that will be presented at the conference during a students poster session. Neither the descriptions or the posters will be published in the proceedings.

Each paper will undergo a peer review of at least 3 anonymous reviewers. The conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS Series. The best papers will be invited after the conference to contribute to a special issue of a top-level journal.

Program committee chairs

  • Ahmed Bouajjani, University Paris Diderot, France
  • Alexandra Silva, University College London, UK

Program committee

  • Elvira Albert, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
  • Luis Barbosa, University of Minho, Portugal
  • Gilles Barthe, IMDEA Software Institute, Spain
  • Borzoo Bonakdarpour, McMaster University, Canada
  • Franck Cassez, Macquarie University, Australia
  • Hana Chockler, King’s College London, UK
  • Pedro D’Argenio, National University of Cordoba & CONICET, Argentina
  • Frank De Boer, CWI, Netherlands
  • Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini, University of Torino, Italy
  • Cezara Dragoi, INRIA, ENS Paris, France
  • Michael Emmi, Bell Labs Nokia, USA
  • Carla Ferreira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
  • Bart Jacob, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
  • Sophia Knight, Uppsala University, Sweden
  • Annabelle McIver, Macquarie University, Australia
  • Stephan Merz, INRIA Nancy, France
  • Stefan Milius, FAU Erlangen, Germany
  • Catuscia Palamidessi, INRIA Paris, France
  • Corina Pasareanu, NASA Ames, USA
  • Anna Philippou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
  • Sanjiva Prasad, IIT Delhi, India
  • Ana Sokolova, University of Salzburg, Austria
  • Marielle Stoelinga, University of Twente, Netherlands

Steering committee

  • Erika Abraham, Aachen University, Germany
  • Catuscia Palamidessi, INRIA Paris, France
  • Susanne Graf, CNRS, France
  • Mahesh Viswanathan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Elvira Albert, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
  • Ivan Lanese, University of Bologna/INRIA, Italy
  • Einar Broch Johnsen, University of Oslo, Norway
  • Frank De Boer, CWI, Netherlands
  • Heike Wehrheim, Paderborn University, Germany
  • Jean-Bernard Stefani, INRIA Grenoble, France (Chair)