[TYPES/announce] CFP: International Conference on Tests And Proofs (TAP)

[Benjamin Pierce]

[Type systems have been used for decades for proving various aspects  
of program correctness, but -- with some notable exceptions, such as  
Claessen and Hughes's QuickCheck tool for Haskell -- have not found  
nearly so many applications in the area of software *testing*.  This  
new meeting presents an interesting opportunity to push further in  
this direction.  -BCP]


CALL FOR PAPERS

TAP International Conference: Tests And Proofs
12-14 February 2007
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
http://tap.ethz.ch/


=== THEME AND GOALS ===

To prove the correctness of a program is to demonstrate, through
impeccable mathematical techniques, that it has no bugs; to test a
program is to run it with the expectation of discovering bugs. The two
techniques seem contradictory: if you have proved your program, it's
fruitless to comb it for bugs; and if you are testing it, that is surely
a sign that you have given up on any hope to prove its correctness.

Accordingly, proofs and tests have, since the onset of software
engineering research, been pursued by distinct communities using rather
different techniques and tools.

And yet the development of both approaches leads to the discovery of
common issues and to the realization that each may need the other. The
emergence of model checking has been one of the first signs that
contradiction may yield to complementarity, but in the past few years an
increasing number of research efforts have encountered the need for
combining proofs and tests, dropping earlier dogmatic views of
incompatibility and taking instead the best of what each of these
software engineering domains has to offer.


=== CONTRIBUTIONS ===

The TAP conference is an international event entirely devoted to this
convergence of proofs and tests. Contributions talking just about proof
techniques, or just about testing techniques, are not appropriate for
submission to TAP; instead we are interested in work that combines ideas
from both sides, for the advancement of software quality.

Possible topics include (as an indicative rather than exhaustive list):
- Generation of test cases or oracles by theorem proving
- Generation of test cases or oracles by constraint logic programming
- Generation of test cases or oracles by model checking
- Generation of test cases or oracles by symbolic execution
- Program proving with the aid of testing techniques
- Automatic tools
- Case studies
- Formal frameworks
- Verification techniques combining proofs and tests
- Experience reports on these topics

Contributions should present high-quality, original work and may not be
already published or submitted elsewhere. They should be submitted in
PDF (with all fonts embedded) using the LNCS format, and may take the
form of either short papers (limit: 8 pages) or long papers (limit: 16
pages). Limits include all text, references, appendices, figures, and
tables.

Submissions should be made online via the submission site, to which a
link will be provided at http://tap.ethz.ch/callforpapers.html.


=== IMPORTANT DATES ===

Submission deadline:            30 September 2006, 24:00 (midnight),
                                 Zurich time (no extensions will be
                                 granted)
Notification of acceptance:     15 November 2006
Camera-ready copy:              7 December 2006
Conference:                     12-14 February 2007


=== COMMITTEES ===

CHAIRPERSONS

Conference chair: Bertrand Meyer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Program chair: Yuri Gurevich, Microsoft Research, USA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Chandrasekhar Boyapati, University of Michigan, USA
Ed Clarke, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
Michael Ernst, MIT CSAIL, USA
Kokichi Futatsugi, JAIST, Japan
Tom Henzinger, EPFL, Switzerland
Daniel Kroening, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Gary Leavens, Iowa State University, USA
Bertrand Meyer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Peter Müller, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Huaikou Miao, Shanghai University, China
Jeff Offutt, George Mason University, USA
Jonathan Ostroff, York University, Canada
Benjamin Pierce, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Wolfram Schulte, Microsoft Research, USA
Yannis Smaragdakis, Georgia Tech, USA
Tao Xie, North Carolina State University, USA

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Lisa (Ling) Liu, ETH Zurich (Chair)
Ilinca Ciupa, ETH Zurich
Claudia Guenthart, ETH Zurich
Andreas Leitner, ETH Zurich
Manuel Oriol, ETH Zurich