[ecoop-info] FMTea19, deadline extension: Formal Methods Teaching Workshop and Tutorial

[Luigia Petre]

Dear colleagues,

Please consider submitting a paper on your experiences with formal methods teaching to our FMTea19 workshop affiliated with the FM conference in Porto in October. We are encouraging a wide spectrum discussion on how we should teach formal methods in the 21st century, so your contribution will be much appreciated. Also note our excellent invited and tutorial speakers: Carroll Morgan, Tony Hoare, and Bas Luttik!

Deadline extended to June 15, paper length 15 pages, publication in Springer LNCS.

Looking forward to meeting you in Porto for a cup of FMTea,
Luigia, Graeme, Brijesh


FMTea19
Formal Methods Teaching Workshop and Tutorial,
Event affiliated with FM2019, 3rd World Congress on Formal Methods
7 October 2019, Porto, Portugal

Deadline extended to June 15, 2019

OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE

Formal Methods provide software engineering with tools and techniques for rigorously reasoning about the correctness of systems. While in recent years formal methods are increasingly being used in industry, university curricula are not adapting at the same pace. Some existing formal methods classes interest and challenge students, whereas others fail to ignite student motivation. We need to find ways to teach formal methods to the next generation, and doing so will require us to adapt our teaching to the 21st century students.

FMTea19 is a combined workshop and tutorial at the 3rd World Congress on Formal Methods, FM2019. Its aim is to share experiences of teaching formal methods that have gone well, or that failed in surprising ways, as well as to develop ways to reboot the presence of formal methods in curricula.

Tutorial part of FMTea19

We are very pleased to have Carroll Morgan giving an invited talk on his approach to and experiences with teaching formal methods to undergraduate students. Sir Tony Hoare will also join us to give a talk on the foundations of teaching computer science for future formal methods scientists. We will run two more tutorial presentations, held by Holger Hermanns and Bas Luttik, on experiences with concurrency and online teaching. Our goal is to discuss various models of existing FM teaching, together with innovative proposals for remaining relevant as educators of Formal Methods in the 21st century.

Workshop Part of FMTea19

In the workshop part of the event, we aim to attract papers detailing authors' experiences with FM Teaching. We would like to get papers discussing successes and failures of various methods, case studies, tools, etc. As self-learning seems to be an important aspect of FM teaching, we appreciate experiences with online teaching, including experiences with teaching formal methods via MOOCs. A non-exhaustive list of topics of interest for the FMTea19 workshop is below:

* traditional FM teaching: lectures, exercises, exams
* online FM teaching/learning: experiences/proposals
* teaching FM for industry
* integrating/embedding FM teaching/thinking within other computer science courses
* student projects on FM, including group projects

Computer science is transforming into a rigorous engineering discipline. Improved teaching techniques will ensure that FM is at the heart of this transformation process.

ORGANIZATION

FMTea19 is organized by FME's Teaching Committee. Our broad aim is to support a worldwide improvement in learning Formal Methods, mainly by teaching but also via self-learning. To that end, we have already gathered a list of FM courses taught worldwide, that can be seen, for the time being, here: https://github.com/luigiapetre/Formal-Methods-Courses/issues  (we are in the process of migrating the courses to a webpage, so they will not live much longer as issues) and plan to collect other resources as well, such as FM case studies, FM inspirational papers, etc.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Luigia Petre, Åbo Akademi University, Finland (co-chair)
* Brijesh Dongol, University of Surrey, UK (co-chair)
* Graeme Smith, University of Queensland, Australia (co-chair)
* Catherine Dubois, ENSIIE, France
* Joao F. Ferreira, University of Lisbon, Portugal
* K. Rustan M. Leino, Amazon Web Services, US
* Alexandra Mendes, University of Beira Interior, Portugal
* Leila Ribeiro, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
* Pierluigi San Pietro, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
* Kenji Taguchi, CAV, Japan

PREVIOUS EDITIONS

Several events focused on teaching aspects for Formal Methods were held in the beginning of the 2000s: two BCS-FACS TFM workshops (Oxford in 2003 and London in 2006), the TFM 2004 conference in Ghent (with proceedings published as Springer LNCS Volume 3294), the FM-Ed 2006 workshop (Hamilton, co-located with FM'06), FORMED (Budapest, at ETAPS 2008), and FMET 2008 (Kitakyushu 2008, co-located with ICFEM). The latest event was TFM2009, the 2nd International FME Conference on Teaching Formal Methods, in November 2009 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

FMTea19 invites high quality papers reporting on opinions, approaches, and experiences related to the topic of teaching Formal Methods. Each submitted paper will be reviewed by at least three PC members. The conference proceedings is planned to be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. All submissions must be original, unpublished, and not submitted for publication elsewhere. Submissions must be in PDF format, using the Springer LNCS style files; we suggest to use the LaTeX2e package (the llncs.cls class file, available in llncs2e.zip and the typeinst.dem available in typeinst.zip as a template for your contribution). Papers should not exceed 15 pages in length. Submissions should be made using the FMTea19 Easychair web site:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=FMTea19

All accepted papers must be presented at the workshop. Their authors must be prepared to sign a copyright transfer statement. At least one author of each accepted paper must register to the conference by an early date, to be indicated by the FM2019 organizers, and present the paper.


IMPORTANT DATES

* June 15 (June 1), 2019: Submission of papers
* July 15 (July 1), 2019: Notifications to authors
* August 15 (August 1), 2019: Proceedings version ready
* October 7, 2019: FMTea19 in Porto