[TYPES/announce] First call for papers "Fun With Formal Methods" (CAV affiliated workshop).

[Николай Шилов]

First Call For Papers
=======================
Fun With Formal Methods 
(FWFM2013, one day workshop Saturday, July 13, 2013, Saint Petersburg,
Russia,
http://www.iis.nsk.su/fwfm2013) 


Affiliated with the 25th International Conference on Computer Aided
Verification
(cav2013.forsyte.at)
=======================

Motivation
45 years have passed since Robert W. Floyd published the first research that
explicitly discussed formally 
how to assign meaning to programs. More than a decade has passed already
since David A. Schmidt published 
an appeal  On the Need for a Popular Formal Semantics.  But recently David
L. Parnas have called Really 
Rethinking "Formal Methods", to question the assumptions underlying the
well-known current formal software 
development methods to see why they have not been widely adopted  and what
should be changed.  So, things 
are right where they started decades ago? 

Not at all, since industrial applications of Formal Methods are not the
unique measure of success. Another 
dimension where we can discuss utility of Formal Methods could be better
education.  A very popular (in 
Russia) aphorism of Mikhail Lomonosov  (the first  Russian academician)
says: "Mathematics should be learned 
just because it disciplines and bring up the mind". We do believe that
Formal Methods discipline and bring 
up minds in Computer Science. We would not like to say that educators should
not care about industrial 
applications of Formal Methods (quite opposite, we must care!). At the same
time Formal Methods education 
helps to bridge a "cultural gap" (E.W.Dijkstra) between Mathematics and
Computer Science. 

The problem is how to overcome a stable allergy to Formal Methods: many
people think Formal Methods are 
too pure in theory but too poor in practice. We do believe that the basic
reason behind this allergy is 
the absence of primary, elementary level. It is not wise to start teaching
arithmetic from Peano axiomatic, 
but it is a common sense to start from elementary problems about numbers of
apples, pencils, etc.  For 
example, nobody  teaches primary school  children  to prove  in Peano
axiomatic ((x+y)+z) = (x+(y+z)) 
for all x, y and z,  but everyone  teaches to solve elementary problems like
the following one: I gave 
5 apples to Peter, and then he gave 2 apples to John; how many apples does
Peter have after that? (If 
you think that he has 3 apples, you are not right, since he has 3 at least.)

In our vision, a part of the reason of student's and engineer's poor
attitude to Formal Methods, is 
very simple:  FM-experts do not care about primary education in this field
at the early stage of higher 
education. In particular, many courses on Formal Semantics start with
fearful terms like state machine, 
logic inference, denotational semantics, etc., without elementary
explanations of the basic notions. 
=======================

Workshop Topics and Scope
The workshop is designed for
1. enjoying the art and beauty of Formal Methods,
2. discussing experience how to make Formal Methods easy, 
3. presenting application of Formal Methods to puzzles, to games, etc.,
4. non-standard problem solving outside programming and Computer Science,
5. everything else about Fun and Joy of Formal Methods.
=======================

Inivited Speakers:
1. Yuri Karpov (Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnic University, Russia)
2. John Rushby (SRI International, California, USA)
=======================

Program Committee
* Paul Curzon (Queen Mary, University of London)
* Victor Kuliamin (Institute for System Programming, Russia)
* Dominique Mery (LORIA & Universit? de Lorraine, France)
* Nikolay Nepejvoda (Program Systems Institute, Russia)
* Nikolay Shilov (chair, Institute of Informatics Systems, Russia)
* Rostislav Yavorsky ("Skolkovo", Russia)
=======================

Submission and Proceedings 
* Original and published papers on topics related to FWFM are solicited. 
* There is no any strict limit for page number or style, but it is
recommended to be in range 
  4-16 pages (single column, single interval, font not less than 12 for
review convenience).
* All submissions must be made electronically in PDF format via EasyChair
conference management system 
  (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fwfm2013).
* We plan to publish informal proceedings before the workshop and
disseminate them among participants at 
  the workshop on USB-sticks.  
* Publication of the post-workshop proceedings will be discussed at the
workshop.
=======================

Important Dates 
* Saturday, April 13th, 2013: Paper submission deadline
* Saturday, May 11th, 2013: Acceptance notification
* Saturday, May 26th, 2013: Camera ready version for preliminary proceedings
* Saturday, July 13th, 2013: Workshop
* Monday, July 15 - Friday, July 19, 2013: CAV Conference
=======================

Registration and Fees
Workshop registration fees will be collected together with CAV registration
fees. From these 
registration fees CAV provides workshop participants with: registration,
meeting facilities, lunches, 
coffee breaks, and proceedings on USB sticks. 

As usual for CAV, the workshop registration fee will be uniform and it will
depend only on the number 
of workshop days people take part in, i.e., one day (1D) or two days (2D).
Each participant registering 
for a workshop has the right to attend the other workshops on the same day.
=======================

Visa Information
The majority of foreign participants will need visas to enter Russia, this
is a two step process: 
First, one has to obtain a visa invitation letter; Then, having the letter,
one applies for a visa 
through the local Russian Consulate. 

The deadline for visa invitation letters through CAV is March 20, 2013 for
non-EU citizens and 
April 10, 2013. After the deadline the participants will have to apply for a
tourist visa invitation 
through the hotel.

We kindly ask submission authors and potential participants to apply for a
visa invitation letter as 
soon as possible (even if their trip/participation plans may change later).
For further details please 
check: http://cav2013.forsyte.at/visa/.
=======================

Contact person: 
Nikolay Shilov (shilov at iis.nsk.su)