REFLECTIONS - CONCLUSIONS

The 1st South-East European Workshop in Formal Methods took place in Thessaloniki on the 20th of November 2003. SEEFM03 was organised by SEERC and CITY College and hosted at STEIN Building Auditorium. The event was sponsored by SINGULAR Software.

The workshop has attracted participation from scientists, academics and researchers from Institutes and Universities all over Europe. More specifically, out of the 15 papers accepted for presentation, 5 of them were from Greece, 2 from UK, and 1 from Netherlands, New Zealand, Turkey, Romania, Finland, Russia, Slovenia, Singapore. In 13 papers, at least one author is related to South-East Europe.

Registration was free. There were 42 people registered for the workshop. The nationalities of the participants are as follows: Greece 19, Romania 5, Turkey 4, FYRoM 4, UK 3, Bulgaria 2, Serbia and Montenegro 1, Slovenia 1, Russia 1, and others.

The event commenced by welcome speeches from Dr.P.Ketikidis, Vice-Principal of CITY College and Dr.D.Stone, Director of SEERC. Both expressed their satisfaction about the number of participants and their willingness to find ways of promoting and organizing similar workshops in the future as well as establishing links between academics in this research area in South-East European states.

Prof.M.Holcombe from the University of Sheffield was the invited speaker. He focused on ways that Formal Methods could contribute to agile methodologies in software development and presented his experience with experimenting on agile formal methods on real-life projects undertaken by students at Sheffield.

There were three sessions that followed. Session A was on agile methodologies and testing. Session B and Session C were on theoretical foundations, verification and tools. All papers were very interesting and raised stimulating discussions among the participants. Each presentation lasted for 20 minutes allowing 5 minutes for questions and 15 minutes for discussion at the end of each session.

In between the last two sessions, there was a panel discussion, which also involved questioning from the participants, chaired by Ms.A.Sotiriadou, on the general topic: "Trends in Formal Method and Opportunities for South-East Europe". The panel consisted of Prof.F.Belli (Turkey), Prof.D.Kleftouris (Greece), Dr.M.Gheorghe (Romania) and Prof.M.Holcombe (UK). The outcomes of this discussion are summarized as follows:

• Formal methods still is a hot research area but there is still no evidence of wide acceptance
• Industry needs to be convinced about the importance of using Formal Methods
• Participants from the industry should be invited to express their opinion
• Formal methods might be suitable for integration with agile methodologies for software development
• Education on Formal Methods should be provided to students who will identify the future needs of the industry
• The "human" factor should be taken seriously into account when using Formal Methods
• The particular characteristics of people in SEE could be identified and due to their strong mathematical background, there might be a chance there to use these people in disseminating the practice on Formal Methods
• The workshop provided a good chance to establish strong links between academics in SEE countries and those links should be exploited.

As a satellite workshop of the 1st Balkan Conference in Informatics, the proceedings of the workshop were included in the CD produced for BCI and reproduced in hard copies for the presenters of the papers. The CD is available on request by SEEFM secretariat at seefm03_secretariat@city.academic.gr.

The workshop concluded by a dinner in a Greek traditional taverna offered to all the presenters from the SEE countries.

Conclusions

• The workshop was the first attempt to bring people from SEE together, based on their common interest in Formal Methods.
• All participants expressed the opinion that the workshop is to be continued on an annual basis.
• It is thought that the workshop could be hosted in Thessaloniki for a couple of times before it is opened to other interested parties.
• A Steering Committee, small and flexible, should be formed.
• A web page containing all links and email addresses of people in SEE should be constructed as a means to disseminate information and practices. The page should initially contain info collected in the workshop, e.g. people, institutions, research groups, interests, projects, courses etc.
• Common projects should be sought between various institutions in SEE with common research interests in Formal Methods
• Every effort should be made to involve people from industry in the next workshops.
• Contacts should be made to seek publication of selected papers in an international journal.
• Discussion group could be formed in order to maintain contact over the net at least once a month to those people who are interested in participating in open discussions. The technological infrastructure for e-discussions will be investigated.
• Structure of the workshop might change to include more invited speakers and a second day that will be mainly devoted to panel discussions and focused discussions on specific work presented during the first day.

Petros Kefalas

Chair of the SEEFM03

On behalf of the Organising Committee