The 2020 Expert Survey on Formal Methods has just been published. This lengthy report has been organised to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS), which was founded by researchers from the CNR Institute of Information Science and Technologies "A. Faedo" (ISTI). The survey addresses 30 questions on the past, present, and future of formal methods in research, industry, and education. A stunning 130 high-profile experts in formal methods (among whom three Turing award winners and many recipients of other prizes and distinctions in computer science) participated in this survey. The report analyses their answers and comments, and moreover presents a collection of 111 position statements provided by these experts. The survey is both an unprecedented effort to gather the collective knowledge of the formal methods community, and a family picture of key players in the field of formal methods. Formal methods are mathematics-based techniques for the specification, development, and (manual or automated) verification of software and hardware systems. The Formal Methods and Tools (FMT) laboratory of CNR-ISTI is an internationally renowned research group in this field, as witnessed by its involvement in this study.
Reference:
H. Garavel, M.H. ter Beek, and J. van de Pol, The 2020 Expert Survey on Formal Methods. In Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (M.H. ter Beek and D. Ničković, Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 12327, Springer, Cham, 2020, pp. 3-69. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-58298-2_1
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