ETAPS Industry Day

Formal Methods, Verification, Validation, Testing, Programming Languages, Modeling, Code Generation—you may imagine that we are enumerating research areas represented in the ETAPS conference? Yes, you are right. But in 2024, these topics are not only research areas, but also areas of active investment and applications in the software and systems industry. Our research field had come of age a long time ago, and is used today on a daily basis in production of a variety of software systems, from the avionics and automotive sectors, through cloud and virtualization infrastructure to web-based and mobile clients of social networks. We strongly believe that an increased interaction between researchers and practitioners can only further accelerate research and development in our field, with a win for both sides.

For this reason, we are trying something new in 2024: the ETAPS Industry Day, a one-day event devoted to research-industry interaction. The day will feature talks by industrial researchers and practitioners, describing their completed and running projects, open problems, and interest in collaboration. We also plan an interactive networking session, lighting talks from the audience, and a presentation about funding opportunities offered by the European Commission.

Speakers from four companies have already confirmed keynote presentations: David Delmas from Airbus, Fritz Henglein from Deon Digital, Yannick Moy from AdaCore, and Jan Peleska from Verified Systems International. More information is available at the industry day page including a submission link for proposing talks on industrial projects and collaborations.

We hope you share our excitement and will support the program with a submission, or by joining the event in Luxembourg. Let the new research advances, grant proposals, practical applications and collaborations between the academic and industrial participants result out of this event, strengthening the community overall.

Nikolai Kosmatov works as an expert in formal verification at Thales Research and Technology where he leads a team on industrial applications of Formal Methods to safety and security of software. His research interests include formal specification, deductive verification, static analysis, symbolic execution, runtime assertions checking and combined analysis techniques. Previously he worked at CEA List where he contributed to the design and development of several analysers of the Frama-C program verification platform. His team actively participates in European and national collaborative projects. Nikolai is convinced that formal methods based techniques and tools should be applied more intensively in many industrial contexts today, and the main purpose of his work is to facilitate these applications.

Andrzej Wąsowski is a Professor of Software Engineering at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the vice-president of the ETAPS association. He had previously worked at Aalborg University (Denmark) and as a visiting professor at RWTH Aachen (Germany), at INRIA Rennes (France), and at the University of (Waterloo), Ontario. His interests lie in software quality, reliability, and safety in high-stakes, high-value software projects. This encompasses semantic foundations and tool support for model-driven development, program analysis tools, testing methodologies, and processes for enhancing and maintaining software quality. Many of his projects involve collaborations with commercial or open-source partners, primarily in the domains of robotics and safety-critical embedded systems. Currently, he leads the Marie-Curie training network on Reliable AI for Marine Robotics (REMARO). Together with Thorsten Berger, he authored the Springer textbook on “Domain Specific Languages, Effective Modeling, Automation, and Reuse.” He holds a PhD degree from the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark (2005), and an MSc Eng degree from the Warsaw University of Technology, Poland (2000).