Back in August, the 3rd International Conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools and Experiments (VSTTE 2010) was hosted by Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh.
VSTTE is the flagship conference associated with the Verified Software Initiative (VSI) — a fifteen year international collaborative project directed at the scientific challenges of large-scale software verification. VSTTE 2010 clearly met the needs of the VSI by attracting strong international participation from both industry and academia.
This year’s conference introduced a number of new and highly successful features, ranging from a two day Summer School, with ten distinguished speakers and thirty students, through to a live software verification competition which attracted eleven international teams. In addition, the setting up of a Microsoft Verified Software Milestone Award was announced at the conference — an annual award, worth 5K to the winners.
“Conferences like VSTTE are essential to bring together the teams of many talents that are needed to realize the vision of zero defect software,” said Turing Award winner Sir Tony Hoare (Microsoft Research Cambridge).
The conference attracted significant sponsorship from industry, funding agencies as well as academic organizations such as FME which we are very grateful for.
Previous VSTTE conferences took place in 2005 (Zurich) and 2008 (Toronto). A mark of the success of the Heriot-Watt event is that the conference is to take place annually, with VSTTE 2011 being located in the US.