TFM2009 2nd Int. FME Conference on Teaching Formal Methods "Widening Access to Formal Methods" Friday, November 6th 2009 co-located with FM2009 : 16th International Symposium on Formal Methods Eindhoven, the Netherlands, November 2 - November 6, 2009 CALL FOR PAPERS (URL: http://www.di.uminho.pt/tfm09) 1. About the conference ----------------------- Ten years after the First World Formal Methods Congress (FM'99) in Toulouse, formal methods communities from all over the world will once again have an opportunity to come together. As part of the First Formal Methods Week event surrounding the FM2009 conference in Eindhoven, Formal Methods Europe will be organizing TFM2009, the Second International Conference on Teaching Formal Methods. The conference will serve as a forum to explore the successes and failures of Formal Methods (FM) education, and to promote cooperative projects to further education and training in FMs. We would like to provide a forum for lecturers, teachers, and industrial partners to discuss their experience, present their pedagogical methodologies, and explore best practices. TFM2009 follows in a series of recent events on teaching formal methods, including: 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), FMET 2008 (Kitakyushu 2008, co-located with ICFEM), etc. 2. Topics of interest --------------------- Formal methods (FM) have an important role to play in the development of complex computing systems - a role acknowledged in industrial standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO/IEC 15408, and in the increasing use of precise modeling notations, semantic markup languages, and model-driven techniques. There is a growing need for software engineers who can work effectively with simple, mathematical abstractions, and with practical notions of inference and proof. However, there is little clear guidance ? for educators, for managers, or for the engineers themselves ? as to what might comprise a basic education in FM. Neither the present IEEE/ACM Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) nor the forthcoming Graduate Software Engineering Reference Curriculum (GSWERC) provide the kind of specific information that teachers and practitioners need to establish an adequate, balanced programme of learning in FM. Original contributions are solicited that provide insight, opinions, and suggestions for courses of action regarding the teaching FMs, including but not limited to the following aspects: * experiences of teaching FMs, both successful and unsuccessful; * educational resources including the use of books, case studies and the internet; * the education of weak and mathphobic students; * the integration, or otherwise, of FMs into the curriculum, including contributions to the definition of a Formal Methods Body of Knowledge (FMBOK); * the advantages of FM-trained graduates in the workplace; * changing attitudes towards FMs in students, academic staff and practitioners; * the necessary mathematical background. Submissions may be up to 20 pages long, using the Springer LNCS format. Negotiations are under way with Springer Verlag for the publication of the proceedings of the conference in the LNCS series. 3. Important dates ------------------ Please put the following dates in your diary: Submission deadline May 25, 2009 Notification of acceptance July 6, 2009 Final version August 3, 2009 4. Invited speakers ------------------- To be announced 5. Programme Committee ---------------------- Izzat Alsmadi (North Dakota State University, USA) Dines Bjorner (IIMM Institute, Denmark) Eerke Boiten (University of Kent, UK) Raymond Boute (Universiteit Gent, Belgium) Andrew Butterfield (Trinity College, Dublin) Jim Davies (University of Oxford, UK) David Duce (Oxford Brookes University, UK) John Fitzgerald (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK) Jeremy Gibbons (University of Oxford, UK) Randolph Johnson (National Security Agency, USA) Michael Mac an Airchinnigh (Trinity College, Dublin) Dino Mandrioli (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) Jose Oliveira (Universidade do Minho, Portugal) Kees Pronk (Technische Universiteit Delft, NL) Bernhard Schaetz (Tecnical University of Munique, Germany) Wolfgang Schreiner (Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria) Simao Melo de Sousa (Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal) Kenji Taguchi (National Institute of Informatics, Japan) Jeannette Wing (Carnegie-Mellon University, USA)