8th Workshop on Horn Clauses for Verification and Synthesis (HCVS) Co-located with ETAPS 2021

28 March 2021 - Virtual

https://www.sci.unich.it/hcvs21/


Invited speakers:

TBA. Please visit the webpage for updates.


Submission deadlines:

- Paper submission: Feb 19, 2021
- Paper notification: Mar 15, 2021
- Workshop: Mar 28, 2021


Many Program Verification and Synthesis problems of interest can be modelled directly using Horn clauses and many recent advances in the CLP and CAV communities have centred around efficiently solving problems presented as Horn clauses.

This series of workshops aims to bring together researchers working in the two communities of Constraint/Logic Programming (e.g., ICLP and CP), Program Verification (e.g., CAV, TACAS, and VMCAI), and Automated Deduction (e.g., CADE, IJCAR), on the topic of Horn clause based analysis, verification, and synthesis.

Horn clauses for verification and synthesis have been advocated by these communities at different times and from different perspectives and HCVS is organized to stimulate interaction and a fruitful exchange and integration of experiences.

The workshop follows seven previous meetings: HCVS 2020 in Dublin, Ireland (ETAPS 2020), HCVS 2019 in Prague, Czech Republic (ETAPS 2019), HCVS 2018 in Oxford, UK (CAV, ICLP and IJCAR at FLoC 2018), HCVS 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden (CADE), HCVS 2016 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands (ETAPS), HCVS 2015 in San Francisco, CA, USA (CAV), and HCVS 2014 in Vienna, Austria (VSL).


Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the use of Horn clauses, constraints, and related formalisms in the following areas:

-Analysis and verification of programs and systems of various kinds (e.g., imperative, object-oriented, functional, logic, higher-order, concurrent, transition systems, Petri-nets, smart contracts)
-Program synthesis
-Program testing
-Program transformation
-Constraint solving
-Type systems
-Machine learning and automated reasoning
-CHC encoding of analysis and verification problems
-Resource analysis
-Case studies and tools
-Challenging problems


We solicit regular papers describing the theory and implementation of Horn-clause based analysis and tool descriptions. We also solicit extended abstracts describing work-in-progress, as well as presentations covering previously published results and posters that are of interest to the workshop.

CHC Competition:
HCVS 2021 will host the 4th competition on constraint Horn clauses ( CHC-COMP), which will compare state-of-the-art tools for CHC solving for performance and effectiveness on a set of publicly available benchmarks. A report on the 4th CHC-COMP will be part of the workshop's proceedings. The report also contains tool descriptions of the participating solvers.


Program Committee:

Bishoksan Kafle, IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain (co-chair)
Hossein Hojjat, Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, USA (co-chair)
Gopal Gupta, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
John Gallagher, Roskilde University, Denmark
Philipp Ruemmer, Uppsala University, Sweden
Andrey Rybalchenko, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
Pedro Lopez-Garcia, CSIC and IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain
Emanuele De Angelis, IASI-CNR, Italy
Fabio Fioravanti, University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy
Daniel Neider, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany
Arie Gurfinkel, University of Waterloo, Canada
Ranjit Jhala, University of California San Diego, USA
Martin Schäf, SRI International, USA
He Zhu, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
Steven Ramsay, University of Bristol, UK
Grigory Fedyukovich, Florida State University, USA
Gidon Ernst, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany
David Monniaux, CNRS, VERIMAG, France
Jorge A. Navas, SRI International, USA



The submission has to be done in one of the following formats:

-Regular papers (up to 12 pages plus bibliography in EPTCS (http://www.eptcs.org/) format), which should present previously unpublished work (completed or in progress), including descriptions of research, tools, and applications.
-Tool papers (up to 4 pages in EPTCS format), including the papers written by the CHC-COMP participants, which can outline the theoretical framework, the architecture, the usage, and experiments of the tool.
-Extended abstracts (up to 3 pages in EPTCS format), which describe work in progress or aim to initiate discussions.
-Presentation-only papers, i.e., papers already submitted or presented at a conference or another workshop. Such papers can be submitted in any format, and will not be included in the workshop post-proceedings.
-Posters that are of interest to the workshop


All submitted papers will be refereed by the program committee and will be selected for inclusion in accordance with the referee reports. Accepted regular papers and extended abstracts will be published electronically as a volume in the Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS) series, see http://www.eptcs.org/ (provided that enough regular papers are accepted).

Papers must be submitted through the EasyChair system using the web page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hcvs2021