[agents] Call for Papers: FormaliSE 2021

[Simon Bliudze]

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Call for Papers: FORMALISE 2021
9th International Conference on Formal Methods in Software Engineering
May 23-24, Madrid, Spain, co-located with ICSE 2021
http://www.formalise.org/
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Overview
--------
The software industry needs tools and methods to deliver high-quality
software. Much progress has been achieved from the early days of
software development; still, nowadays, even considering the state of the
art of the technologies used, the success of software projects is often
not guaranteed. Many of the approaches used for developing large,
complex software systems are still not able to ensure the correct
behavior — and the general quality — of the delivered product, despite
the efforts of the (often very qualified and skilled) software engineers
involved. This is where formal methods can play a significant role.
Indeed, they have been developed to provide the means for greater
precision and thoroughness in modeling, reasoning about, validating, and
documenting the various aspects of software systems during their
development. When carefully applied, formal methods can aid all aspects
of software creation: user requirement formulation, design,
implementation, verification/testing, and the creation of documentation.

After decades of research though, and despite significant advancement,
formal methods are still not widely used in industrial software
development. We believe that closer integration of formal methods in
software engineering can help increase the quality of software
applications, and at the same time highlight the benefits of formal
methods in terms also of the generated return on investment (ROI).

The main objective of the conference is to foster the integration
between the formal methods and the software engineering communities, to
strengthen the — still too weak — links between them, and to stimulate
researchers to share ideas, techniques, and results, with the ultimate
goal to propose novel solutions to the fraught problem of improving the
quality of software systems.

Originally a successful satellite workshop of ICSE, since 2018 FormaliSE
is organised as a conference co-located with ICSE. FormaliSE 2021 will
take place on May 23-24, 2020, in Madrid, Spain (or online).

Topics of interest
------------------
Areas of interest include but are not limited to:
-  approaches and tools for verification and validation;
-  application of formal methods to specific domains, e.g., autonomous,
   cyber-physical, intelligent, and IoT systems;
-  scalability of formal methods applications;
-  integration of formal methods within the software development
   lifecycle (e.g., change management, continuous integration and
   deployment)
-  requirements formalization and formal specification;
-  model-based software engineering approaches;
-  performance analysis based on formal approaches;
-  formal methods in a certification context;
-  formal approaches for safety and security-related issues;
-  usability of formal methods;
-  guidelines to use formal methods in practice;
-  case studies developed/analyzed with formal approaches;
-  experience reports on the application of formal methods to real-world
   problems;

Submission types
----------------
We invite you to submit:

-  Full research papers that must describe the authors’ original research
   work and results. We encourage authors to include validation with
   respect to a case study in the recommended themes.
-  Case study papers that should identify lessons learned, validate
   theoretical results (such as scalability of methods) or provide
   specific motivation for further research and development.
-  Research ideas: FormaliSE encourages the submissions of new research
   ideas in order to stimulate discussions at the conference.

For the case studies, we aim at having common domains and themes, which
can facilitate the exchange of ideas during the conference. While all case
study subjects are accepted, we are particularly interested in the following
themes: autonomous vehicles and Covid contact tracing apps.

Submission guidelines
---------------------
FormaliSE 2021 will implement the following light-weight double-blind
policy: Authors of research papers must omit their names and institutions
from the title page, they should refer to their other work in the third
person
and omit acknowledgements that could reveal their identity or
affiliation. The
purpose is to avoid any bias based on authors’ identity characteristics,
such
as gender, seniority, or nationality, in the review process. Our goal is to
facilitate an unbiased approach to reviewing by supporting reviewers’
access to
works that do not carry obvious references to the authors’ identities. As
mentioned above, this is a light-weight double-blind process. Anonymization
should not be a heavy burden for authors and should not make papers
weaker or
more difficult to review. Advertising the paper on alternate forums
(e.g., on
a personal web-page, pre-print archive, email, talks, discussions with
colleagues) is permitted, and authors will not be penalized by for such
advertisement.

Full papers are expected to be roughly 10 pages long including all text,
figures, tables and appendices, but excluding the references (shorter papers
are acceptable). However, we would like to avoid that the authors waste time
fitting their papers into that limit at the expense of presentation clarity:
*paper lengths slightly exceeding the stated limit will be tolerated
provided
that the presentation is of high quality*, which will be left at the
appreciation of the reviewers. Research ideas papers are expected to be
roughly 4 pages plus up to 1 additional page of references, with the same
guiding principle as for the regular papers above. All submissions must
be in
English and in PDF format.

Submissions must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions IEEE Conference
Proceedings Formatting Guidelines
<https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html> (title in 24pt
font and full text in 10pt type). LaTeX users must use
`\documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran}` without including the `compsoc`
or `compsocconf` options. Additionally, we recommend placing the following
two lines in your LaTeX source right after the `\documentclass` command:

   \usepackage[switch,columnwise]{lineno}
   \linenumbers

This adds line numbers, thereby allowing reviewers to refer to specific
lines
in their comments.

Papers submitted to FormaliSE 2021 must not have been published
elsewhere and
must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under
consideration for FormaliSE 2021.

Submissions to FormaliSE 2021 that meet the above requirements can be
made via
EasyChair <https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=formalise2021> by the
submission deadline.

We would appreciate it if the authors intending to submit a paper were to
inform us in advance. In particular, we invite them to submit an abstract as
early as possible and, in any case, before the Abstract submission deadline
below.

Selection procedure
-------------------
Each paper will be reviewed by at least three program committee members.
Papers will be judged on the basis of their clarity, relevance, originality,
and contribution to the field.

FormaliSE 2021 will implement a light-weight rebuttal scheme: if all the
reviewers of a given submission agree that a clarification from the authors
regarding one specific question could move a borderline paper into the
acceptable range, the chairs will ask that question to the authors by e-mail
and post their reply on EasyChair for the benefit of the reviewers. The
goal of
such light-weight rebuttals is to eliminate “coin-toss” decisions on
borderline
papers. Hence, it will clearly concern only a minority of submissions
and most
of the authors should not expect to receive such questions. However, we
would
ask the corresponding authors of all submissions to make sure that they are
available to answer a question by email if the necessity were to arise.

Publication
-----------
All accepted publications are published as part of the ICSE 2021
Proceedings in
the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries.

At least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the
conference
— physically or, if the circumstances warrant so, virtually — and
present the
paper in person. Otherwise, the paper will be removed from the proceedings.

Important dates
---------------

===================== =========== ====
Abstracts due:        05 January  2021
Submissions due:      12 January  2021
Notifications:        22 February 2021
Camera ready copies:  22 March    2021
FormaliSE conference: 23-24 May   2021
===================== =========== ====

Organization
------------

General Chairs
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-  Stefania Gnesi, ISTI-CNR, Italy
-  Nico Plat, Thanos, The Netherlands

Program Chairs
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-  Simon Bliudze, INRIA Lille, France
-  Laura Semini, Università di Pisa, Italy

Social Media Chair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-  Lucia Nasti, Università di Pisa, Italy

Program committee
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-  Dalal Alrajeh (Imperial College London, UK)
-  Rabéa Ameur Boulifa (EURECOM, France)
-  Toshiaki Aoki (JAIST, Japan)
-  Kyungmin Bae (Pohang University of Science and Technology, South
   Korea)
-  Maurice H. ter Beek (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
-  Domenico Bianculli (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)
-  Christiano Braga (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil)
-  Ana Cavalcanti (University of York, UK)
-  Stéphanie Challita (University of Rennes 1 & Inria/IRISA, France)
-  Hélène Coullon (IMT Atlantique, France)
-  Nancy Day (University of Waterloo, Canada)
-  Alessandro Fantechi (University of Florence, Italy)
-  Marc Frappier (Université de Sherbrooke, Canada)
-  Carlo A. Furia (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland)
-  Ebru Aydin Gol (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
-  Roberta Gori (University of Pisa, Italy)
-  Jan Friso Groote (Eindhoven University of Technology, The
   Netherlands)
-  Marie-Christine Jakobs (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
-  Srdan Krstic (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
-  Peter Gorm Larsen (Aarhus University, Denmark)
-  Axel Legay (UC Louvain, Belgium)
-  Malte Lochau (University of Siegen, Germany)
-  Antónia Lopes (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
-  Tiziana Margaria (University of Limerick and Lero, Ireland)
-  Mieke Massink (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
-  Anastasia Mavridou (NASA Ames, USA)
-  Hernán Melgratti (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
-  Peter Ölveczky (University of Oslo, Norway)
-  Patrizio Pelliccione (Chalmers University of Technology & University
   of Gothenburg, Sweden)
-  Gwen Salaün (Université Grenoble Alpes, France)
-  Ina Schaefer (TU Braunschweig, Germany)
-  Marjan Sirjani (Reykjavik University, Iceland)
-  Paola Spoletini (Kennesaw State University, USA)
-  Marcel Verhoef (European Space Agency, The Netherlands)

Contact information
-------------------
We can be reached at oc at formalise.org.