Welcome to the <i>2004 Annual International Conference of ACM's Special Interest Group on Ada</i> (SIGAda), being held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The Buckhead area of Atlanta is a marvelous place to hold a conference as it has pleasant weather in November facilitating technical discussions in a congenial environment.
We offer you a conference featuring a top-quality technical program focused on important strengths of Ada: distributed, real-time, and embedded systems. The visions of these systems reflected in Ada's original requirements in the 1970s have expanded in almost unimaginable ways with Ada 95 implementations, and continue to be objects of envy by those in the programming language community who understand what the strengths of a language bring to implementers in terms of efficiency, reliability, and effectiveness. Software challenges remain dominant in these domains with rapid hardware advances. Most other languages fail to meet the needs identified as far back as the 1976 Steelman, being able at best to do only 3/4 of the needed function while Ada performs over 95%. Ada's track record of reliability, efficiency, robustness and all-around success is unparalleled at solving real-time and/or distributed system challenges. Ada is used in space/satellite systems, most modern jetliner avionics, high-speed ground transportation systems, and battle automation systems. As such, it is an important part of the world's economies and defenses.
Three days of technical papers, keynotes, and invited presentations will report how these successes are achieved and where remaining issues are leading. We are fortunate to have leaders in the software engineering community to provide keynote addresses to set the tone for our conference.
We are also fortunate to have special presentations which will give you an opportunity to find out how Ada continues to evolve to meet our future requirements, to result in Ada 2005.
Beyond the formal conference of selected papers and presentations, SIGAda 2004 offers workshops and tutorials with the same duality of on-theme and complementary topics. SIGAda's tutorials provide full-day or half-days on selected topics to enhance one's professional development. SIGAda's workshops allow those working the same issues to share with each other and leverage everyone's accomplishments; workshop products are "delivered" to the community.
The broad offerings of career-enhancing tutorials include basic Ada 95 introductions for software engineers new to Ada, intermediate and advanced Ada topics for practitioners striving to expand their Ada expertise, and several language-independent technology topics. These topics are often coupled with Ada technology because only Ada's full and complete definition allows one to indicate what is expected, and to show that it can be achieved. Join us in understanding how these topics mutually support the disciplined development and evolution of serious, high quality software systems.
Finally, we hope SIGAda 2004 provides you an outstanding opportunity for rewarding affiliation with colleagues in industry, academia, and government - discussions "in the hall," informal meal-time meetings, and even during the more relaxed moments we make for socializing in this wonderful southern city. If you don't realize it already, you will learn that these associations can be as valuable as the technical program at professional conferences, and often extend the experience after you return home.
We take this opportunity to thank our Corporate Sponsors as they participate in this year's SIGAda Conference. Our Platinum sponsors are Microsoft, Ada Core Technologies, Green Hills Software, and Aonix. Our Silver Sponsors are TNI-Europe, I-Logix, and Artisan Software. Also exhibiting are Praxis Critical Systems and PolySpace Technologies.
Proceeding Downloads
Cheddar: a flexible real time scheduling framework
This paper describes an Ada framework called Cheddar which provides tools to check if a real time application meets its temporal constraints. The framework is based on the real time scheduling theory and is mostly written for educational purposes. With ...
Measuring the effectiveness of ACATS
This paper reviews the effectiveness of the Ada Conformity Assessment Test Suite (ACATS) for testing the implicit components of an Ada application. Rough measures are achieved on the basis of both requirements coverage and structural coverage.
Information systems security engineering: a critical component of the systems engineering lifecycle
The purpose of this research paper is to illustrate the industrial and federal need for Information Systems Security Engineering (ISSE) in order to build Information Assurance (IA) into a system rather than the current costly practice of fixing systems ...
Model driven development with Ada
System and software development has become an increasingly complex science. With so many emerging devices, processors, systems specification languages, software implementation languages, and tools for all of these, there needs to be a common denominator ...
A refactoring tool for Ada 95
Refactoring is a technique for restructuring code to improve its design. A tool for automatically applying refactoring transformations to Ada 95 programs is described. The tool is based on a language-neutral static-analysis toolset named CodeSurfer, and ...
Re-engineering global variables in Ada
This paper describes one method for identifying <i>global variables</i> in Ada procedures and adding them to the parameter list of appropriate procedures. Global variables, ones that are visible to the entire program, are considered harmful to the ...
Comparative analysis of genetic algorithm implementations
Genetic Algorithms provide computational procedures that are modeled on natural genetic system mechanics, whereby a coded solution is "evolved" from a set of potential solutions, known as a population. GAs accomplish this evolutionary process through ...
Enforcing security and safety models with an information flow analysis tool
Existing security models require that information of a given security level be prevented from ``leaking'' into lower-security information. High-security applications must be demonstrably free of such leaks, but such demonstration may require substantial ...
Teaching graphics using Ada
This paper describes several tools related to the Ada language that were developed to support the teaching of a computer graphics course. These tools include an updated and improved OpenGL Ada specification file, a VRML-to-code conversion tool, and an ...
GNAT: on the road to Ada 2005
The GNAT Development Team is directly involved with the Ada 2005 effort, both participating in the Ada Rapporteur Group (ARG), and implementing and testing the new features proposed for the language revision. In this paper we summarize the Ada 2005 ...