[POPLmark] WMM'08 call for papers

[Karl Crary]

Apologies for the cross-posting.

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Call for Papers

3rd Informal ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Mechanizing Metatheory
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN

Co-located with ICFP’08.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sweirich/wmm/

Important Dates

* Submission deadline: 3 July 2008
* Author Notification: 1 August 2008
* Workshop: 20 September 2008

Workshop Description

Researchers in programming languages have long felt the need for tools 
to help formalize and check their work. With advances in language 
technology demanding deep understanding of ever larger and more complex 
languages, this need has become urgent. There are a number of automated 
proof assistants being developed within the theorem proving community 
that seem ready or nearly ready to be applied in this domain—yet, 
despite numerous individual efforts in this direction, the use of proof 
assistants in programming language research is still not commonplace: 
the available tools are confusingly diverse, difficult to learn, 
inadequately documented, and lacking in specific library facilities 
required for work in programming languages.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers who have 
experience using automated proof assistants for programming language 
metatheory, and those who are interested in using tool support for 
formalizing their work. One starting point for discussion will be the 
obstacles that hinder mechanisation (whether they be pragmatic or 
technical), and what users and developers can do to overcome them.

Format

The workshop will consist of presentations by the participants, selected 
from submitted abstracts. It will focus on providing a fruitful 
environment for interaction and presentation of ongoing work. 
Participants are invited to submit working notes, source files, and 
abstracts for distribution to the attendees, but as the workshop has no 
formal proceedings, contributions may still be submitted for publication 
elsewhere. (See the SIGPLAN republication policy for more details.)

Scope

The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to:

* Tool demonstrations: proof assistants, logical frameworks, 
visualizers, etc.
* Libraries for programming language metatheory.
* Formalization techniques, especially with respect to binding issues.
* Analysis and comparison of solutions to the POPLmark challenge.
* Examples of formalized programming language metatheory.
* Proposals for new challenge problems that benchmark programming 
language work.

Submission Guidelines

Email submissions to crary AT cs.cmu.edu. Submissions should be no 
longer than one page and in PDF and printable on US Letter or A4 sized 
paper. Persons for whom this poses a hardship should contact the program 
chair.

Conference Organization

Program Committee

* Adam Chlipala, Jane Street Capital
* Karl Crary, Carnegie Mellon University (chair)
* Carsten Schuermann, IT University Copenhagen
* Aaron Stump, Washington University in St. Louis
* Christian Urban, TU Munich

Workshop Organizers

* Michael Norrish, National ICT Australia
* Stephanie Weirich, University of Pennsylvania
* Steve Zdancewic, University of Pennsylvania

Previous Workshops

* Freiburg, 2007
* Portland, 2006