Welcome to the 17th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs

Formal techniques can help analyse programs, precisely describe program behaviour, and verify program properties. Languages such as Java, C#, and Scala provide good platforms to bridge the gap between formal techniques and practical program development, because of their reasonably clear semantics and standardized libraries. Moreover, these languages are interesting targets for formal techniques, because the novel paradigm for program deployment introduced with Java, with its improved portability and mobility, opens up new possibilities for abuse and causes concern about security.

Work on formal techniques and tools for programs and work on the formal underpinnings of programming languages themselves naturally complement each other. This workshop aims to bring together people working in both these fields, on topics such as:

• Language Semantics
• Specification techniques and languages
• Verification of program properties
• Verification logics
• Dynamic program analysis
• Static program analysis
• Type systems
• Challenge problems and solutions
• Security

For details of previous workshops, visit http://www.cs.ru.nl/ftfjp/.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Contributions (of up to 6 pages in the ACM 2-column style) are sought on open questions, new developments, or interesting new applications of formal techniques in the context of Java or similar languages. Contributions should not merely present completely finished work, but also raise challenging open problems or propose speculative new approaches. We particularly welcome contributions that simply present suitable topics for discussion at the workshop, or raise issues that you feel deserve the attention of the research community. Examples include future work identified from existing research, potential PhD proposals, and experience reports from case studies/competitions. Contributions will be formally reviewed, for originality, relevance, and the potential to generate interesting discussions.

The workshop will be organized into sessions, each focused on a specific topic, and initiated by a presentation of few related position papers by the respective participants, or the introduction of the specific topic by a single speaker, and followed by discussion. These discussions aim to share common experiences, provide constructive feedback, and build potential research collaborations.

Accepted papers will have the option of being published in the ACM Digital Library. In addition, depending on the nature of the contributions, we may be organizing a special journal issue as a follow-up to the workshop, as has been done for some of the previous FTfJP workshops. Contributions must be in English, in PDF format, and are limited to 6 pages in ACM 2-column style. Papers must be submitted electronically via Easy Chair. All deadlines are at 23:59 American Samoa time (that is, UTC-11).

Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ftfjp2015 Any PC member, other than the chair, may be an author or co-author on any paper submitted for consideration but will be excluded from any evaluation or discussion of the paper.

The following papers are available in the ACM digital library at

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2786536&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=700757145&CFTOKEN=73024006

• A three-valued type system for true positives detection in Java-like languages, Davide Ancona and Federico Frassetto.
• Automatic Verification of Dafny Programs with Traits, Reza Ahmadi, K. Rustan M. Leino and Jyrki Nummenmaa.
• Conditional Effects in Fine-grained Region Logic, Yuyan Bao, Gary Leavens and Gidon Ernst.
• Foo: A minimal Modern OO Calculus, Prodromos Gerakios, George Fourtounis and Yannis Smaragdakis.
• Imperative Objects with Dependent Types, Joana Campos and Vasco Vasconcelos.
• Provably Live Exception Handling, Bart Jacobs.
• Regression Verification for Java Using a Secure Information Flow Calculus, Bernhard Beckert, Vladimir Klebanov, Mattias Ulbrich
• Run-time Assertion Checking of JML Annotations in Multithreaded Applications with e-OpenJML, Jorne Kandziora, Marieke Huisman, Christoph Bockisch and Marina Zaharieva-Stojanovski

The paper - Delegation vs Inheritance for Typestate Analysis, Du Li, Alex Potanin and Jonathan Aldrich is available at http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~alex/files/LiPotaninAldrichFTfJP2015.pdf

Speaker: Marieke Huisman (University of Twente, Netherlands)

Title: Verification of Concurrent Software: Java and OpenCL

Abstract:

This talk presents the VerCors approach to verification of concurrent software. First we discuss why verification of concurrent software is important, but also challenging, and we show how permission-based separation logic allows one to reason about concurrent programs in a thread-modular way. We show how we extend the logic to reason about functional properties of Java programs in a concurrent setting. Further, we also show how the approach is used to reason about kernel programs using the Single Instruction Multiple Data paradigm. Concretely, we illustrate how permission-based separation logic is used to verify functional correctness properties of OpenCL kernels.

Biography:

Marieke Huisman (F) is an Adjoint Professor in the Formal Methods and Tools group at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. She obtained her PhD in 2001 from the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her thesis was about the semantics and verification of sequential Java programs. She spent almost eight years at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France as a Charg’e de Recherche, working on verification of (in particular concurrent) programs, application-specific security, compositionality and concurrency. In 2008 she joined the University of Twente.

In 2010 she received a personal ERC Starting Grant for the VerCors project on Verification of Concurrent Data Structures. In 2013 she received the Dutch ICT Research award, a unique prize for a scientist, aged 40 years or younger, who carries out innovative research or is responsible for a scientific breakthrough in ICT. In addition, she has been involved in several EU projects, such as CARP, Mobius, VerifiCard.

Registration fees increase on June 6th and again on July 4th. See https://2015.ecoop.org/attending/registration for details.