FormaliSE 2022

Submission timeline

• 13 Jan 2022 Abstract registration
• 27 Jan 2022 Full paper 20 Jan 2022 → 27 Jan 2022 +7 days
• 4 Mar 2022 Notification

• 22 May 2022 Conference opens

What to submit

Format

10 pages ACM (full papers / case study papers), 4 pages (research ideas)

Proceedings

IEEE/ACM — ACM Digital Library

Light-weight rebuttal scheme in 2022. Held in conjunction with ICSE.

Call for papers

• After a deadline extension FORMALISE-2022-extended.txt · TXT · shown below
• As first published FORMALISE-2022.txt · TXT

The call, as published

Reproduced verbatim from the organisers’ announcement, after a deadline extension. The conference’s own page is at www.formalise.org/.

Call for Papers: FORMALISE 2022
10th International Conference on Formal Methods in Software Engineering
May 22-23, co-located event of ICSE 2022, Pittsburgh, PA
http://www.formalise.org/

*** SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JANUARY 27 ***

Overview
--------

The software industry needs tools and methods to deliver high-quality
software. Much progress has been achieved from the early days of software
development; still, nowadays, even considering the state of the art of the
technologies used, the success of software projects is often not guaranteed.
Many of the approaches used for developing large, complex software systems are
still not able to ensure the correct behavior — and the general quality — of
the delivered product, despite the efforts of the (often very qualified and
skilled) software engineers involved. This is where formal methods can play a
significant role. Indeed, they have been developed to provide the means for
greater precision and thoroughness in modeling, reasoning about, validating,
and documenting the various aspects of software systems during their
development. When carefully applied, formal methods can aid all aspects of
software creation: user requirement formulation, design, implementation,
verification/testing, and the creation of documentation.

After decades of research though, and despite significant advancement, formal
methods are still not widely used in industrial software development. We
believe that closer integration of formal methods in software engineering can
help increase the quality of software applications, and at the same time
highlight the benefits of formal methods in terms also of the generated return
on investment (ROI).

The main objective of the conference is to foster the integration between the
formal methods and the software engineering communities, to strengthen the —
still too weak — links between them, and to stimulate researchers to share
ideas, techniques, and results, with the ultimate goal to propose novel
solutions to the fraught problem of improving the quality of software systems.

Originally a successful satellite workshop of ICSE, since 2018 FormaliSE is
organised as a conference co-located with ICSE. FormaliSE 2022 will take place
on 22-23 May 2022 in Pittsburgh, PA as an in-person event. Authors unable to
attend in person will be able to present their talk remotely. Depending on the
development of the Covid pandemic, FormaliSE 2022 may switch to a fully online
mode if necessary. The final decision will be announced in the first week of
April 2022 at the latest.


Topics of interest
------------------

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

- approaches, methods and tools for verification and validation;
- correctness-by-construction approaches for software and systems engineering;
- application of formal methods to specific domains, e.g., autonomous, cyber-
physical, intelligent, and IoT systems;
- formal methods for AI-based systems (FM4AI), and AI applied in formal method
approaches (AI4FM);
- scalability of formal methods applications;
- integration of formal methods within the software development lifecycle
(e.g., change management, continuous integration and deployment);
- requirements formalization and formal specification;
- model-based software engineering approaches;
- analysis of performance and other non-functional properties based on formal
approaches;
- formal methods in a certification context;
- formal approaches for safety and security;
- usability of formal methods;
- guidelines to use formal methods in practice;
- case studies developed/analyzed with formal approaches;
- experience reports on the application of formal methods to real-world
problems.


Submission types
----------------

We invite you to submit:

- Full research papers that describe authors’ original research work and
results. We encourage authors to include validation with respect to a case
study in the recommended themes. We welcome research papers focusing on tools
and tool development.

- Case study papers that identify lessons learned, validate theoretical
results (such as scalability of methods), or provide specific motivation for
further research and development.

- Research ideas: FormaliSE encourages the submission of new research ideas in
order to stimulate discussions at the conference.


Artifact Evaluation (NEW)
-------------------------

Reproducibility of experimental results is crucial to foster an atmosphere of
trustworthy, open, and reusable research. To improve and reward
reproducibility, FormaliSE 2022 for the first time includes a dedicated
Artifact Evaluation (AE) procedure. An artifact is any additional material
(software, data sets, machine-checkable proofs, etc.) that substantiates the
claims made in the paper and ideally makes them fully reproducible. Submission
of an artifact is optional but encouraged for all papers where it can support
the results presented in the paper. Artifacts will be reviewed concurrently
with the paper reviewing process, and the results of the evaluation may be
taken into consideration for the corresponding paper acceptance decision.
Accepted papers with a successfully evaluated artifact will receive a badge to
be shown on the published paper's title page. All papers with an evaluated and
publicly archived artifact with a DOI may be allowed one extra page in the
camera-ready version to describe the artifact.


Submission guidelines
---------------------

FormaliSE 2022 will implement the following **light-weight double-blind
policy**: Authors of full research and research ideas papers must omit their
names and institutions from the title page, refer to their other work in the
third person, and omit acknowledgements that could reveal their identity or
affiliation. Authors of case study papers are encouraged to do so if
anonymization does not detract from the presentation or impact the FormaliSE
PC's ability to review the paper. The purpose is to avoid any bias based on
authors’ identity characteristics, such as gender, seniority, or nationality,
in the review process. Our goal is to facilitate an unbiased approach to
reviewing by supporting reviewers’ access to works that do not carry obvious
references to the authors’ identities. As mentioned above, this is a light-
weight double-blind process. *Anonymization should not be a heavy burden for
authors and should not make papers weaker or more difficult to review.*
Advertising the paper on alternate forums (e.g., via a personal web-page,
preprint archive, email, talks, discussions with colleagues) is permitted, and
authors will not be penalized for such advertisement.

**Full papers are expected to be up to 10 pages long including all text,
figures, tables and appendices, but excluding the references.** (Shorter
papers are acceptable). However, we would like to avoid that the authors waste
time fitting their papers into that limit at the expense of presentation
clarity: *paper lengths slightly exceeding the stated limit will be tolerated
provided that the presentation is of high quality*, which will be left at the
appreciation of the reviewers. **Research ideas papers are expected to be 4
pages plus up to 1 additional page of references**, with the same guiding
principle as for the regular papers above. All submissions must be in English
and in PDF format.

All submissions must conform to the ACM formatting guidelines. Formatting
instructions are available at
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word
users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-
Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble
of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the
ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-
Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing
referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.

Papers submitted to FormaliSE 2022 must not have been published elsewhere and
must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under
consideration for FormaliSE 2022.

Submissions to FormaliSE 2022 that meet the above requirements can be made via
EasyChair <https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=formalise2022>.

As part of the submission process on EasyChair, authors will be asked to
declare their conflicts of interest with PC members to facilitate the double-
blind reviewing process.

Artifact submissions are not subject to the double-blind submission
requirement since it is in most cases infeasible to properly anonymize an
artifact. Note that the paper corresponding to an artifact must still follow
the double-blind submissions requirements described above. Artifacts will be
handled by a separate Artifact Evaluation Committee, and the Artifact
Evaluation process will be set up such that the anonymization of the
corresponding papers will not be compromised.

Detailed guidelines for preparation and submission of artifacts can be found
at
https://www.formalise.org/content/artifact-evaluation


Selection procedure
-------------------

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three program committee members.
Papers will be judged on the basis of their clarity, relevance, originality,
and contribution to the field.

FormaliSE 2022 will implement **a light-weight rebuttal scheme**: if all the
reviewers of a given submission agree that a clarification from the authors
regarding a specific question could move a borderline paper into the
acceptable range, the chairs will ask that question to the authors by e-mail
and post their reply on EasyChair for the benefit of the reviewers. The goal
of such light-weight rebuttals is to eliminate “coin-toss” decisions on
borderline papers. Hence, it will clearly concern only a minority of
submissions and most of the authors should not expect to receive such
questions. However, *we would ask the corresponding authors of all submissions
to make sure that they are available to answer a question by email if the
necessity were to arise*.

Artifacts will be assessed with respect to their consistency with the results
presented in the paper, their completeness, and their documentation and ease
of use. The Artifact Evaluation will include an initial check for technical
issues; authors of artifacts may be contacted by e-mail within the first two
weeks after artifact submission to help resolve any technical problems that
prevent the evaluation of an artifact if necessary.


Publication
-----------

All accepted publications are published as part of the ICSE 2022 Proceedings
in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries.

At least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the
conference — physically or, if the circumstances warrant so, virtually — and
present the paper in person. Otherwise, the paper will be removed from the
proceedings.


Important dates
---------------

===================== =========== ====
Abstracts due:              --
Submissions due:      27 January  2022 (EXTENDED!)
Artifacts due:        31 January  2022 (EXTENDED!)
Notifications:        04 March    2022 (to be confirmed)
Camera ready copies:  18 March    2022 (to be confirmed)
FormaliSE conference: 22-23 May   2022
===================== =========== ====


Organization
------------

General Chairs
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Stefania Gnesi (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Italy)
- Nico Plat (Thanos, The Netherlands)

Program Chairs
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Ina Schaefer (TU Braunschweig, Germany)
- Arnd Hartmanns (University of Twente, The Netherlands)

Artifact Evaluation Chair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Carlos E. Budde (Università degli Studi di Trento, Italy)

Social Media Chair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Claudio Menghi (McMaster University, Canada)

Program committee
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Toshiaki Aoki (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
- Kyungmin Bae (Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea)
- Simon Bliudze (INRIA Lille, France)
- Rabéa Ameur Boulifa (Télécom Paris, France)
- Christiano Braga (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil)
- Ana Cavalcanti (University of York, UK)
- Nancy Day (University of Waterloo, Canada)
- Carlo Furia (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland)
- Ebru Aydin Gol (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
- Roberta Gori (Università di Pisa, Italy)
- Laura R. Humphrey (Air Force Research Laboratory, USA)
- Marie-Christine Jakobs (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)
- Sebastian Junges (Radboud Universiteit, The Netherlands)
- Wanwei Liu (National University of Defense Technology, China)
- Malte Lochau (Universität Siegen, Germany)
- Antónia Lopes (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
- Mieke Massink (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Italy)
- Anastasia Mavridou (NASA Ames Research Center, USA)
- Hernán Melgratti (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)
- Alex Potanin (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
- Gwen Salaün (Université Grenoble Alpes, France)
- Sean Sedwards (University of Waterloo, Canada)
- Laura Semini (Università di Pisa, Italy)
- Silvia Lizeth Tapia Tarifa (Universitetet i Oslo, Norway)
- Maurice ter Beek (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Italy)
- Andrea Turrini (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
- Marcel Verhoef (European Space Agency, The Netherlands)
- Heike Wehrheim (Universität Paderborn, Germany)