VerifyThis Verification Competition
to be held at ETAPS 2015 in London
Sunday, 12 April 2015

News

  • 15 April: Awards are announced
  • 15 April: VerifyThis 2016 to be held at ETAPS in Eindhoven
  • 12 April: Workshop dinner at 19:30 (location)
  • 23 March: Detailed schedule available
  • 17 February: We encourage participants to register for the ETAPS workshop dinner, which will conclude the competition day
  • 29 January: Applications for travel grants can be submitted until February 10. Early registration deadline is February 14.
  • 24 November: Thanks to our sponsors, the best student team will receive a 500 Euro cash prize. It is also likely that we will offer limited travel grants to participants needing them.
  • 30 October: A call for problems is published. Submission deadline: 28 November
  • 22 October: website online

About

VerifyThis 2015 is a program verification competition taking place as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2015) on April 12th, 2015 in London, UK. It is the 4th event in the VerifyThis competition series.

The aims of the competition are:
  • to bring together those interested in formal verification, and to provide an engaging, hands-on, and fun opportunity for discussion 
  • to evaluate the usability of logic-based program verification tools in a controlled experiment that could be easily repeated by others. 

We Thank Our Sponsors

Microsoft Research

Formal Methods Europe

Galois, Inc.

The competition will offer a number of challenges presented in natural language. Participants have to formalize the requirements, implement a solution, and formally verify the implementation for adherence to the specification. 

There are no restrictions on the programming language and verification technology used. The correctness properties posed in problems will have the input-output behavior of programs in focus. Solutions will be judged for correctness, completeness and elegance.

If you would like to contribute a challenge or make suggestions on challenge selection, do not hesitate to contact the organizers at etaps2015@verifythis.org.

Schedule

  • 28 November: Problem submission deadline
  • 10 February: Travel grant application deadline
  • 14 February: ETAPS early registration deadline
  • 12 April 2015: Competition (full-day event, concluded by the ETAPS workshop dinner)

Francis Bancroft Building (where the workshops are) / Room: FB.1.09

  • 09h00: Challenge 1
  • 10h00: BREAK
  • 10h15: Challenge 2
  • 11h15: BREAK
  • 11h30: Challenge 3
  • 13h00: LUNCH
  • 14h00: Discussion & Judging
  • 19h30: Workshop dinner (location)


Participation / Registration

Participation is open for anybody interested. Teams of up to two people are allowed. Physical presence on site is required. We particularly encourage participation of:
  • student teams (this includes PhD students)
  • non-developer teams using a tool someone else developed
  • several teams using the same tool
VerifyThis is an official one-day satellite event of ETAPS. Please register with ETAPS. To facilitate planning, please also send an email to etaps2015@verifythis.org stating your planned team composition and verification system(s) you plan to use. Informal inquiries are welcome at the same address.

For travel grants available to the participants needing support see below.

Travel Grants

The competition has funds for a limited number of travel grants. A grant covers the incurred travel and accommodation costs up to a certain amount. The amount is EUR 250 for those coming from Europe and EUR 500 for those coming from outside Europe.

To apply for a travel grant, send an email to etaps2015@verifythis.org. The application should include:
  • your name
  • your affiliation
  • the academic degree you are seeking resp. your career stage
  • the verification system(s) you plan to use at the competition
  • the planned composition of your team
  • a short letter of motivation explaining your involvement with formal verification so far
  • if you are a student or PhD student, please have your supervisor send a brief letter of support by email to the same address.

Evaluation criteria are qualifications (for the applicant's career level), need (please explain briefly in your application), and diversity (technical, geographical, etc.).

The deadline for applying is February 10th (anywhere on earth time). Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 12th. ETAPS early registration deadline is February 14th.

Prizes

Prizes will be awarded in the following categories:
  • best team
  • best student team
  • tool used by most teams
  • distinguished user-assistance tool feature
The best student team will receive a 500 Euro cash prize donated by our sponsors.

Call for Problems

To extend the problem pool and tender better to the needs of the participants, we are now soliciting verification problems for the competition:
  • a problem should contain an informal statement of the algorithm to be implemented (optionally with complete or partial pseudocode) and the requirement(s) to be verified
  • a problem should be suitable for a 60-90 minute time slot
  • submission of reference solutions is strongly encouraged
  • problems with an inherent language- or tool-specific bias should be clearly identified as such
  • problems that contain several subproblems or other means of difficulty scaling are especially welcome
  • the organizers reserve the right (but no obligation) to use the problems in the competition, either as submitted or with modifications
  • submissions from (potential) competition participants are allowed
Submissions are to be sent per email to etaps2015@verifythis.org. Submission deadline is November 28th.
The best submission will receive a prize.

Related Events and Activities

VerifyThis 2015 is the 4th event in the VerifyThis competition series. Related events are the Verified Software Competition (VSComp: 1st, 2nd, latest) held online and the Competition on Software Verification (SV-COMP) focusing on evaluating systems in a way that does not require user interaction. SV-COMP is associated with TACAS.

VerifyThis is also a collection of verification problems (and solutions). Its counterpart is VerifyThus - a distribution of deductive verification tools for Java-like languages, bundled and ready to run in a VM. Both were created with support from COST Action IC0701.

A workshop on comparative empirical evaluation of reasoning systems (COMPARE2012) was held on June 30th at IJCAR 2012 in Manchester. Competitions were one of the main topics of the workshop.

Organizers

The organizers can be reached per email at etaps2015@verifythis.org.