Call for Papers

                                  OpenCert 2010 

               4th International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for
                        OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE CERTIFICATION

                          Pisa, Italy - 17-18 September 2010
                             Satellite Event to SEFM 2010

                             http://opencert.iist.unu.edu/

                         Submission deadline: 28 June, 2010

CONTEXT & OBJECTIVES

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on
the way software systems and and software-based services are developed, distributed and deployed. 
Widely acknowledged benefits of OSS include reliability, low development and maintenance costs, 
as well as rapid code turnover. Linux distributions, Apache and MySQL serve, among many other examples,
as a testimony to its success and resilience.

However, state-of-the-art OSS, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed 
development model, make software quality assessment, let alone full certification, particularly
hard to achieve and raises important challenges both from the technical/methodological and
the managerial points of view.

This makes the use of OSS, and, in particular, its integration within complex industrial-strength 
applications, with stringent security requirements, a risk. And, simultaneously an opportunity and
a challenge for rigourous, mathematically based, methods in software analysis and engineering.

In such a context, the aim of this  workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry
who are broadly interested in the quality assessment of open source software projects, ultimately leading
to the establishment of coherent certification processes, at different levels. 

Following the success of the three previous editions (colocated to ETAPS'07, in Braga, and OSS'08,
at IFIP WCC, in Milan, and ETAPS'09, in York), the workshop will focus on formal methods and
model-based techniques that appear promising to facilitate OSS certification.
Both foundational, methodological and pragmatic  issues will be addressed, through both standard
technical communications and reports on concrete case-studies and experimental data.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions are expected to foster a broad debate on OSS assessment and certification, integrating 
techniques and elements from areas as different as

   - product and process certification
   - certification standards
   - formal modelling and verification (model checking and theorem proving)
   - software quality and reverse engineering
   - static analysis, testing and inspection
   - safety, security and usability certification
   - language design and evolving systems
   - automated source code analyses
   - empirical studies


SUBMISSION
The two-day workshop will feature invited talks, a pannel discussion and contributed
paper presentations.  All contributions, in the form of either full technical papers,
between 10 and 16 pages, or short position papers, will undergo a peer-review process. 
All papers should be written in English and in ECEASST format. 

Detailed information on the submission procedure are available at opencert.iist.unu.edu/


PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be published in Electronic Communications of the EASST (ECEASST)
Publication of selected papers in a journal is currently under negotiation.

 IMPORTANT DATES

  - Abstract submission: 21 June, 2010
  - Paper submission deadline: 28 June, 2010
  - Acceptance notification: 30 July, 2010
  - Final version due: 14 August, 2010


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

B. Aichernig, Graz, Austria
A. Abdurahmanovic, PrimeKey, Sweden
L. Barbosa, Minho, Portugal (co-chair)
A. Capiluppi, East London, UK
A. Cerone, UNU-IIST, Macau, SAR China (co-chair)
G. Ciobanu, A.I. Cuza, Romania
E. Damiani, Milano, Italy
J. Davies, Oxford, UK
R. di Cosmo, Paris Diderot, France
F. Fabbrini, ISTI-CNR, Italy
M. J. Frade, Minho, Portugal
J. Fisteus, Madrid Carlos III, Spain
D. Ghica, Birmingham, UK
T. Janowski, UNU-IIST, Macau, SAR China
P. Krishnan, Bond, Australia
P. Milazzo, Pisa, Italy
J. Miranda, Multicert, Portugal
J. Noll, LERO, Ireland
A. Petrenko, ISP-RAS, Russia
S. Pickin, Madrid Carlos III, Spain
S. Shaikh, Coventry, UK (co-chair)
S. K. Sowe, UNU-MERIT, The Netherlands
R. Treinen, Paris Diderot, France
J. Visser, SIG, The Netherlands
D. von Oheimb, Siemens, Germany
T. Vos, UP Valencia, Spain
A. Wasserman, CMU, USA


CONTACTS
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WEB
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