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CMU-TAU International Summer School on Formal Specifications and Analysis for Software Engineers (SPECS)

Software is playing an increasingly critical role in our society, being used to control complex systems such as medical devices, intelligent vehicles, critical infrastructure, financial applications, and many others. Formal specifications have a key role in software and systems development, as they serve as a rigorous bridge between requirements and implementation, between the world and the machine. The use of formal specifications has the potential to significantly improve the quality of software systems, as they encourage software engineers to be precise about the systems they build and enable a formal, possibly automatic analysis. However, writing correct specifications, reading them, and using them effectively in a software development process, are all challenging tasks.

The goals of the summer school are to attract graduate students to research on formal specifications and to advance the work in this area.

The school will focus on Alloy and Spectra as cases in point. It will include a mix of lectures by PIs, presentations by attending graduate students, hands-on user level and developer level tutorials on both languages and tools, a mini-hackathon, and discussions about research challenges and opportunities.

The school is organized by Eunsuk Kang (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) and Shahar Maoz (Tel Aviv University, Israel). It is funded by a grant from The Lowy International School at Tel Aviv University. We expect to provide free accomadation in TAU university housing and reimburse most of the travel costs of the participants.

Lecturers