Future Directions for Formal Methods and Its Transition To Practice

Important Dates

• Workshop : December 5-6, 2012 (Wed-Thu)

Background

The past decade has seen tremendous advances in the theory and practice of software verification, and several success stories in the transition of verification techniques from the research lab to development tools.

However, despite these advances, much work remains in several directions. These include determining the best ways to applying these advances to broader, higher-level issues like reliability, and privacy in new domains like cyber-physical systems and medicine; in finding the best ways to reach out to practitioners, and to train engineers to use formal methods principles, methodologies and tools; and in finding ways for to multiply the effectiveness of researchers through the use of shared platforms and infrastructure.

Goals

The goal of this NSF workshop is to identify the future directions in research in formal methods and its transition to industrial practice. The workshop will bring together researchers from academia, industry, and government agencies working in the area of formal methods and verification, and identify primary challenges in the field, both foundational, infrastructural, and in transitioning ideas from research labs to developer tools.

The ultimate goal of the workshop is to produce a white paper that outlines the key directions of research in the medium term that should facilitate a transition of formal methods to engineering practice.