Keynote Speakers

 

Swarm Verification

Gerard J. Holzmann
NASA, USA

Abstract. Supercomputer designer Seymour Cray once reportedly said that he would sooner use two strong oxen to plow a field than a thousand chickens. Although this is undoubtedly wise when it comes to plowing a field, it is not so clear for other types of tasks. Model checking problems are of the proverbial "search the needle in a haystack" type. Such problems can often be parallelized easily. Alas, none of the usual divide and conquer methods can be used to parallelize the working of a model checker. Given that it has become easier than ever to gain access to large numbers of computers to perform even routine tasks it is becoming more and more attractive to find alternate ways to use these resources to speed up model checking tasks. This talk describes one such method, called swarm verification.

Presentation: [slides]

Reflections on, and predictions for, support systems for the development of programs

Cliff B. Jones
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, UK

Abstract. My first attempt to build a “Formal Development Support System” was in IBM in the 1970’s; more public is the “mural” system we built in Manchester; the Rodin (EU) project developed a set of open source tools that are now being used in the (EU) DEPLOY project. These attempts give me some perspective from which to predict what sort of tool will finally make the difference to software developers that CAD systems have made in hardware design. It is unlikely that all of my predictions will be agreed with by all of the community.

Presentation: [slides]

Software and Services a future in common: the NESSI perspective 

Stefano De Panfilis
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A., Italy

Abstract. Internet is becoming a critical infrastructure for the growth of the modern economy and society by allowing everybody to access information in a transparent way, independently from time, location and computing device. While today, users' main interactions with and through Internet remain web browsing or exchange of e-mails, a revolution is happening with the availability of software services. NESSI (the "Networked European Software and Services Initiative") was born, through the initiative of main software European industries, with the overall goal to deliver an integrated coherent and consistent set of methods, tools and technologies to consolidate and trigger innovation in service-oriented technologies. This presentation will provide an overview of NESSI and the role software and automation will play in this revolution. 

Presentation: [slides]