Call for Papers - OpenCert 2007
 
   1st International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for

                OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE CERTIFICATION

                 Braga, Portugal - 31 March, 2007
                  Satellite Event of ETAPS 2007
 
                  http://opencert.iist.unu.edu/
 

                   Submission: 8 January, 2007


 BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
 
 The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from
 academia and industry who are interested in developing techniques for
 the quality assessment of Open Source Software (OSS), leading to the
 definition of a complete certification process.
 
 In recent years, Open Source Software (OSS) has gained considerable
 interest. Several reasons for this growing popularity can be
 identified:
 
   - Successful OSS projects, like the Linux operating system, the
     Mozilla web browser and the Apache web-server, have demonstrated
     the strength of the OSS development process.
 
   - Today, governments all over the world are becoming aware of
     growing dependence on proprietary formats and software in their
     administration.
 
   - OSS is free, and companies are beginning to reduce their
     development costs by integrating OSS into their products.
 
 However, state-of-the-art OSS development has two main weaknesses:
 
  (1) it is hard to objectively assess the quality of OSS, and
 
  (2) OSS projects are hard to control and to predict due the lack of
      central management.
 
 These make the use of OSS a risk, especially in security-sensitive
 domains. A standard approach to reduce such a risk is to establish
 an independent certification process. However, today we lack
 standards and methods to certify the quality of OSS. The workshop
 will focus on formal methods and model-based techniques that appear
 promising to facilitate OSS certification. Techniques should take
 those aspects into account which are specific to OSS, such as
 unconventional development, rapid evolution of the code, and huge
 amount of legacy code.
 
 Contributions to the workshop are expected to present foundations,
 methods, tools and case studies that integrate techniques from
 different areas such as

   - product and process certification
   - formal modelling
   - formal verification: model checking & theorem proving
   - reverse engineering
   - static analysis, testing and inspection
   - safety and security
   - language design and evolving systems
   - empirical software engineering
   - case studies

 The one-day workshop will feature keynote speaker and contributed
 paper presentations. All submitted papers will undergo a peer-review
 process. Accepted papers will be published by Elsevier in the series
 Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS). Detailed
 information on the submission procedure will be available on the
 conference website. Publication of a selection of the papers in a
 special issue of a journal is also under consideration.
 
 
 SUBMISSION
 
 Submissions to the workshop must not have been published or be
 concurrently considered for publication elsewhere. All submissions
 will be judged on the basis of originality, contribution to the
 field, technical and presentation quality, and relevance to the
 workshop. Papers should be written in English and not exceed 16
 pages in ENTCS format (see http://www.entcs.org/prelim.html). All
 enquiries should be sent to: [log in to unmask]
 
 
 IMPORTANT DATES
 
   - Submission deadline: 8 January, 2007
   - Acceptance notification: 25 Janaury, 2007
   - Final version due: 03 February, 2007

   
  ORGANISERS
   
   Bernhard Aichernig TU Graz, Austria
   Luis Barbosa Univ. of Minho, Portugal

    
 STEERING COMMITTEE
 
   Bernhard Aichernig TU Graz, Austria
   Jose Nuno Oliveira Univ. of Minho, Portugal
   Antonio Cerone UNU-IIST, Macau-China
   Martin Michlmayr Cambridge, UK
   David von Oheimb Siemens, Germany

    
 PROGRAM COMMITTEE
 
   Bernhard Aichernig TU Graz, Austria (Co-chair)
   Luis Barbosa Univ. of Minho, Portugal (Co-chair)
   Roberto Barbuti Univ. of Pisa, Italy
   Peter T. Breuer U. Carlos 3 Madrid, Spain
   Antonio Cerone UNU-IIST, Macau-China
   Marsha Chechik Univ. of Toronto, Canada
   Karim Djouani Univ. of Paris 12 , France
   Stefania Gnesi ISTI-CNR, Italy
   Paddy Krishnan Bond Univ., Australia
   Volkmar Lotz SAP, France
   Tom Maibaum McMaster Univ., Canada
   Leon Moonen TU Delft, The Netherlands
   Alexander Petrenko ISP RAS, Russia
   Arie van Deursen TU Delft, The Netherlands
   David von Oheimb Siemens AG, Germany

--
Dr. Bernhard K. Aichernig, Associate Research Fellow of UNU-IIST
                           http://www.iist.unu.edu/~bka
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