Conference: 2024 Formal Methods in the Field PI Meeting

The purpose of this project is to organize the second meeting of NSF's Formal Methods in the Field (FMitF) program. Expected participants are investigators of projects currently funded by the program and a selection of researchers interested in submitting proposals to it in the future. The project's novelties are the participation of potential future applicants and invited talks from people in industries where formal methods are in regular use. The project's impacts are an increased awareness of the FMitF program and a deeper understanding of the variety of research it supports, which will likely lead to a increased participation of the scientific community in the future. Broader impacts include the strong potential for improvements in the approaches being developed by the educational projects supported by the FMitF program, as those approaches could build on the experience accumulated by the transition-to-practice projects and the challenges encountered in training external users. The event, which will be hosted by the University of Iowa, will be one and a half days long and will take place in person in Iowa City, Iowa, on November 12-13, 2024. It will include activities such as short talks and poster presentations by researchers from currently funded projects, invited talks by prominent researchers in formal methods from industry, and breakout discussion sessions. The objectives of the meeting are to give the FMitF program directors an overview on the state of progress in the various funded projects, let all participants learn about the research funded by the program, provide opportunities for cross-fertilization of ideas, and, finally, identify challenges in the broader adoption of formal methods and suggest next steps for addressing them. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.