Welcome to Portland and to HILT 2014, this year's annual international conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on the Ada Programming Language (SIGAda). This year we are pleased to be colocated with the SPLASH 2014 conference, enabling even more chances for interactions with colleagues in industry, academia, and government.
HILT 2014 features a top-quality technical program focused on the issues associated with high integrity software -- where a failure could cause loss of human life or have other unacceptable consequences -- and on the solutions provided by language technology. "Language technology" here encompasses not only programming languages but also languages for expressing specifications, program properties, domain models, and other attributes of the software or the overall system.
HILT 2014 consists of two days of tutorials, and two days of conference sessions. The tutorials cover a wide range of topics: Ada 2012, SPARK 2014, High-Integrity OOP, AADLv2, and the Rust language. The conference program includes keynote and invited presentations from internationally recognized experts:
Christine Anderson (Spaceport America) on From Ada9X to Spaceport America: Going Where No One Has Gone Before;
Peter Feiler (Software Engineering Institute /Carnegie Mellon University), on AADL and Model-Based Engineering; and
Tom Ball (Microsoft Research), on Correctness via Compilation to Logic.
HILT 2014 conference sessions deal with a range of topics associated with safe, secure and reliable software: enhancing and evolving embedded systems languages for safety; behavioral modeling and code generation; practical use of assertions and formal methods in industry; and safe programming languages for the multicore era. You will learn the latest developments in model and program verification technologies, and hear industrial presentations from practitioners. The accompanying exhibits will give you the opportunity to meet our corporate sponsors and find out about their latest offerings. Sponsors include AdaCore (Platinum Level); Microsoft Research (Gold Level); Ellidiss (Silver Level).
At HILT 2014 you will learn about both the challenges confronting high integrity software and the solutions available to address them. Perhaps just as important are the social interactions that you get at a live conference, this year co-located with the SPLASH 2014 conference: the chance to meet and talk with researchers and practitioners in industry, academia, and government, to ask them questions, and to explain your own work and interests. These renewed and new associations can be as valuable as the technical program at professional conferences, and their benefits will continue to reward you well after you return home.
Proceeding Downloads
From Ada 9x to spaceport America: going where no one has gone before
Ada 95, aka Ada9X at the time because we didn't know when we would be done, was a labor of love for most of us. A spectacular team was assembled from all over the world. I had the distinct pleasure and honor of being the Department of Defense Ada 9X ...
Ada 83 to Ada 2012: lessons learned over 30 years of language design
This presentation will comprise a discussion between two language designers, John Barnes and Tucker Taft, who have been intimately involved with the design of Ada over the past 30 years. During the discussion they will review the successful and less ...
Can C++ be made as safe as SPARK?
SPARK offers a way to develop formally-verified software in a language (Ada) that is designed with safety in mind and is further restricted by the SPARK language subset. However, much critical embedded software is developed in C or C++. We look at ...
mbeddr: extensible languages for embedded software development
In this industrial presentation we will demonstrate mbeddr, an extensible set of integrated languages for embedded software development. After discussing the context of the talk, we will give details about the mbeddr architecture, which relies on the ...
AADL and model-based engineering
Mission and safety critical software-reliant systems, aka. Cyber-physical systems, face the increasing challenges of exponential increase in verification related software rework cost. Industry studies show that 70% of defects are introduced in ...
Resolute: an assurance case language for architecture models
Arguments about the safety, security, and correctness of a complex system are often made in the form of an assurance case. An assurance case is a structured argument, often represented with a graphical interface, that presents and supports claims about ...
Hybrid annex: an AADL extension for continuous behavior and cyber-physical interaction modeling
Correct design, and system-level dependability prediction of highly-integrated systems demand the collocation of requirements and architectural artifacts within an integrated development environment. Hybrid systems, having dependencies and extensive ...
Leveraging Ada 2012 and SPARK 2014 for assessing generated code from AADL models
Modeling of Distributed Real-time Embedded systems using Architecture Description Language provides the foundations for various levels of analysis: scheduling, reliability, consistency, etc.; but also allows for automatic code generation. A challenge is ...
Formal semantics for the PACEMAKER system specification
This paper formally expresses the timing behavior of a cardiac pacemaker as defined in the PACEMAKER System Specification as understood by its principal author.
The PACEMAKER System Specification was publicly released by Boston Scientific to provide a ...
UML with meaning: executable modeling in foundational UML and the Alf action language
To most in the software community, "modeling" is drawing pictures, something much different than "coding". While programming languages must be specified precisely enough to be executable, this has not necessarily been the case for modeling languages. ...
Correctness via compilation to logic: a decade of verification at microsoft research
Advances in automated theorem provers over the last decade have led to a renaissance in software tools that compile problems of correctness to problems over logic formula. In this talk, I will review progress in automated theorem provers, such as Z3 ...
Specification of generic APIs, or: why algebraic may be better than pre/post
Specification based on Floyd-Hoare logic, using pre- and post-conditions, is common in languages aimed at high integrity software. Such pre/postcondition specifications are geared towards verification of code. While this specification technique has ...
A framework for model checking UDP network programs with Java pathfinder
Complex asynchronous, distributed systems could benefit significantly from model checking, but model checking programs do not natively support verification of distributed software. Several frameworks have been developed recently that apply model ...
Safe parallel programming in ada with language extensions
The increased presence of parallel computing platforms brings concerns to the general purpose domain that were previously prevalent only in the specific niche of high-performance computing. As parallel programming technologies become more prevalent in ...
Spot: a programming language for verified flight software
The C programming language is widely used for programming space flight software and other safety-critical real time systems. C, however, is far from ideal for this purpose: as is well known, it is both low-level and unsafe. This paper describes Spot, a ...
The rust language
Rust is a new programming language for developing reliable and efficient systems. It is designed to support concurrency and parallelism in building applications and libraries that take full advantage of modern hardware. Rust's static type system is safe...
Panel summary: finding safety in numbers: new languages for safe multicore programming and modeling
This panel brings together designers of both traditional programming languages, and designers of behavioral specification languages for modeling systems, in each case with a concern for the challenges of multicore programming. Furthermore, several of ...