[TYPES/announce] TAP 2016 (Tests & Proofs): CfP

[Carlo Alberto Furia]

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  TAP 2016
  10th International Conference on Tests & Proofs

   5-7 July 2016, Vienna, Austria
   Co-located with STAF 2016

   http://tap2016.ist.tugraz.at

   Call for Papers
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   * Abstracts: 29 January 2016
   * Papers: 5 February 2016
   * Notifications: 15 April 2016
   * Camera ready versions: 6 May 2016


The TAP conference promotes research in verification and formal
methods that targets the interplay of proofs and testing: the
advancement of techniques of each kind and their combination, with the
ultimate goal of improving software and system dependability.

Dijkstra's famous remark that "testing shows the presence, not the
absence of bugs" contributed to reinforcing the opinion that program
testing and program proving are antithetical techniques. Under the
traditional view, proving aims at establishing correctness, whereas
testing aims at uncovering errors: a correct program needs no testing,
and there's no point in trying to prove a buggy one. As a result,
research in verification has historically been divided into separate
communities, with only few interested in both testing and proving.

This attitude has changed significantly over the last
decade. Verification research has seen a convergence of heterogeneous
techniques and a synergy between traditionally distinct
communities. Testing and proving are increasingly seen as
complementary rather than mutually exclusive techniques: formal
testing can increase the confidence in the correctness of program
parts that are hard to reason about formally, and proving can help
make testing more efficient and systematic.

The TAP conference aims to promote research in the intersection of
testing and proving by bringing together researchers and practitioners
from both areas of verification.


Scope & Topics
--------------

TAP's scope encompasses many aspects of verification technology,
including foundational work, tool development, and empirical
research. Its topics of interest center around the connection between
proofs (and other static techniques) and testing (and other dynamic
techniques). Papers are solicited on, but not limited to, the
following topics:

   * Verification and analysis techniques combining proofs and tests

   * Program proving with the aid of testing techniques

   * Deductive techniques (theorem proving, model checking, symbolic
     execution, SMT solving, constraint logic programming, etc.) to
     support testing: generating testing inputs and oracles, supporting
     coverage criteria, and so on.

   * Program analysis techniques combining static and dynamic analysis

   * Specification inference by deductive and dynamic methods

   * Testing and runtime analysis of formal specifications

   * Model-based testing and verification

   * Using model checking to generate test cases

   * Testing of verification tools and environments

   * Applications of testing and proving to new domains, such as
     security, configuration management, and language-based techniques

   * Bridging the gap between concrete and symbolic reasoning
     techniques

   * Innovative approaches to verification such as crowdsourcing and
     serious games

   * Case studies, tool and framework descriptions, and experience
     reports about combining tests and proofs


Submissions
-----------

TAP 2015 accepts regular-length research papers (16 LNCS pages +
references), short papers (6 LNCS pages + references), and tool
demonstration papers (8 LNCS pages + references). For details, see the
submission instructions: http://tap2016.ist.tugraz.at/submission.shtml

Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions
of their TAP 2016 papers for a special issue of the Springer journal
Formal Aspects of Computing (http://link.springer.com/journal/165).


Organization
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PC Chairs:

   * Bernhard K. Aichernig, Graz University of Technology, Austria
   * Carlo A. Furia, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Program Committee:

   * Jasmin C. Blanchette, Inria Nancy and MPI Saarbruecken, France and
     Germany
   * Achim D. Brucker, SAP AG, Germany
   * Catherine Dubois, ENSIIE, France
   * Gordon Fraser, University of Sheffield, UK
   * Juan Pablo Galeotti, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
   * Angelo Gargantini, Universitá di Bergamo, Italy
   * Alain Giorgetti, FEMTO-ST Institute and University of
      Franche-Comte, France
   * Christoph Gladisch, Bosch GmbH, Germany
   * Martin Gogolla, University of Bremen, Germany
   * Arnaud Gotlieb, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
   * Ashutosh Gupta, Tata Institute, Mumbai, India
   * Reiner Haehnle, TU Darmstadt, Germany
   * Marieke Huisman, University of Twente, the Netherlands
   * Bart Jacobs, KU Leuven, Belgium
   * Nikolai Kosmatov, CEA LIST, France
   * Laura Kovacs, Chalmers and TU Wien, Sweden and Austria
   * Shaoying Liu, Hosei University, Japan
   * Panagiotis (Pete) Manolios, Northeastern University, USA
   * Karl Meinke, KTH, Sweden
   * Brian Nielsen, Aalborg University, Denmark
   * Nadia Polikarpova, MIT, USA
   * Andrew J. Reynolds, EPFL, Switzerland
   * Augusto Sampaio, Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil
   * Martina Seidl, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
   * Jun Sun, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
   * Nikolai Tillmann, Microsoft, USA
   * T. H. Tse, the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
   * Margus Veanes, Microsoft Research Redmond, USA
   * Burkhart Wolff, University of Paris-Sud, France