The 19th edition of the International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM) was held in virtual mode due to the COVID-19 pandemic from December 6-10, 2021. The conference aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government to advance the state of the art in formal methods, facilitate their adoption in the software industry, and promote their integration into practical software engineering methods and tools.

The conference also included a call for paper submissions. Our researchers Edi Muskardin and Ingo Pill from the Research Unit Trustworthy Adaptive Computing, led by Willibald Krenn, together with their colleagues Martin Tappler and Bernhard Aichernig from TU Graz followed this call. Their paper "Active Model Learning of Stochastic Reactive Systems", which was written in the DES Lab, convinced the expert jury and they received the Best Paper Award on December 10, 2021. Congratulations!

Successful start of AALpy

In the course of the work in the DES Lab, the research team also implemented and already published the new open-source library AALpy, which is freely available to everyone. "The approach presented in our SEFM paper is part of our open-source library AALpy that offers a comprehensive set of approaches for learning different kinds of automata for black box systems via actively interacting with them", Ingo Pill explains the connection and the function of AALpy. More information about the work in the DES Lab can be found under https://research-network.silicon-austria.com/des-lab/. AALpy can be accessed via https://github.com/DES-Lab/AALpy

Success also for Italian research partners

We would also like to congratulate our Italian research colleagues from the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) and the University of Udine for winning the other Best Paper Award. Their paper is entitled "Fairness, Assumptions, and Guarantees for Extended Bounded Response LTL synthesis".

The papers mentioned above, as well as the entire SEFM main conference proceedings, are published in the Formal Methods subseries of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science and can be accessed via Software Engineering and Formal Methods | SpringerLink.