Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP) 2021: Final Call for Papers

[Andrei Popescu]

Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP) is an international conference on
practical and theoretical topics in all areas that consider formal
verification and certification as an essential paradigm for their
work. CPP spans areas of computer science, mathematics, logic, and
education.

CPP 2021 (https://popl21.sigplan.org/home/CPP-2021) will be held on
18-19 January 2021 and will be co-located with POPL 2021. CPP 2021 is
sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN, in cooperation with ACM SIGLOG.

NEWS

* CPP 2021 will feature Distinguished Paper Awards.
* CPP 2021 will take place on January 18-19, 2021 as a virtual or
hybrid physical-virtual meeting. This means that the authors will be
able to present their papers online. The POPL and CPP organizers are
monitoring the COVID-19 situation, and in September/October they will
make an announcement on whether there will also be a physical meeting
in Copenhagen; but irrespective of that decision, the online paper
presentation option will be guaranteed.
* The submission deadline is one month earlier than usual.

IMPORTANT DATES

* Abstract Deadline: 16 September 2020 at 23:59 AoE (UTC-12h)
* Paper Submission Deadline: 22 September 2020 at 23:59 AoE (UTC-12h)
* Notification: 24 November 2020
* Camera Ready Deadline: 15 December 2020
* Conference: 18-19 January 2021

Deadlines expire at the end of the day, anywhere on earth. Abstract
and submission deadlines are strict and there will be no extensions.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome submissions in research areas related to formal
certification of programs and proofs. The following is a
non-exhaustive list of topics of interest to CPP:

* certified or certifying programming, compilation, linking, OS
kernels, runtime systems, security monitors, and hardware;
* certified mathematical libraries and mathematical theorems;
* proof assistants (e.g, ACL2, Agda, Coq, Dafny, F*, HOL4, HOL Light,
Idris, Isabelle, Lean, Mizar, Nuprl, PVS, etc);
* new languages and tools for certified programming;
* program analysis, program verification, and program synthesis;
* program logics, type systems, and semantics for certified code;
* logics for certifying concurrent and distributed systems;
* mechanized metatheory, formalized programming language semantics,
and logical frameworks;
* higher-order logics, dependent type theory, proof theory, logical
systems, separation logics, and logics for security;
* verification of correctness and security properties;
* formally verified blockchains and smart contracts;
* certificates for decision procedures, including linear algebra,
polynomial systems, SAT, SMT, and unification in algebras of interest;
* certificates for semi-decision procedures, including equality,
first-order logic, and higher-order unification;
* certificates for program termination;
* formal models of computation;
* mechanized (un)decidability and computational complexity proofs;
* formally certified methods for induction and coinduction;
* integration of interactive and automated provers;
* logical foundations of proof assistants;
* applications of AI and machine learning to formal certification;
* user interfaces for proof assistants and theorem provers;
* teaching mathematics and computer science with proof assistants.

DISTINGUISHED PAPER AWARDS

Around 10% of the accepted papers at CPP 2021 will be designated as
Distinguished Papers. This award highlights papers that the CPP
program committee thinks should be read by a broad audience due to
their relevance, originality, significance and clarity.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Prior to the paper submission deadline, the authors should upload
their anonymized paper in PDF format through the HotCRP system at
https://cpp2021.hotcrp.com

The submissions must be written in English and provide sufficient
detail to allow the program committee to assess the merits of the
contribution. They must be formatted following the ACM SIGPLAN
Proceedings format (http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/) using
the acmart style with the sigplan option, which provides a two-column
style, using 10 point font for the main text, and a header for double
blind review submission, i.e.,

\documentclass[sigplan,10pt,anonymous,review]{acmart}\settopmatter{printfolios=true,printccs=false,printacmref=false}

The submitted papers should not exceed 12 pages, including tables and
figures, but excluding bibliography and clearly marked appendices. The
papers should be self-contained without the appendices. Shorter papers
are welcome and will be given equal consideration. Submissions not
conforming to the requirements concerning format and maximum length
may be rejected without further consideration.

CPP 2021 will employ a lightweight double-blind reviewing process. To
facilitate this, the submissions must adhere to two rules:
(1) author names and institutions must be omitted, and
(2) references to authors' own related work should be in the third
person (e.g., not "We build on our previous work ..." but rather “We
build on the work of ...").

The purpose of this process is to help the PC and external reviewers
come to an initial judgment about the paper without bias, not to make
it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try.
Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the
submission or makes the job of reviewing it more difficult. In
particular, important background references should not be omitted or
anonymized. In addition, authors are free to disseminate their ideas
or draft versions of their papers as usual. For example, authors may
post drafts of their papers on the web or give talks on their research
ideas. POPL has answers to frequently asked questions addressing many
common concerns:
https://popl20.sigplan.org/track/POPL-2020-Research-Papers#Submission-and-Reviewing-FAQ

We encourage the authors to provide any supplementary material that is
required to support the claims made in the paper, such as proof
scripts or experimental data. This material must be uploaded at
submission time, as an archive, not via a URL. Two forms of
supplementary material may be submitted:
(1) Anonymous supplementary material is made available to the
reviewers before they submit their first-draft reviews.
(2) Non-anonymous supplementary material is made available to the
reviewers after they have submitted their first-draft reviews and have
learned the identity of the authors.

Please use anonymous supplementary material whenever possible, so that
it can be taken into account from the beginning of the reviewing
process.

The submitted papers must adhere to the SIGPLAN Republication Policy
(https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Policies/Republication/) and the
ACM Policy on Plagiarism
(https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism). Concurrent
submissions to other conferences, journals, workshops with
proceedings, or similar forums of publication are not allowed. The PC
chairs should be informed of closely related work submitted to a
conference or journal in advance of submission.

One author of each accepted paper is expected to present it at the
(totally or partly virtual) conference.

PUBLICATION, COPYRIGHT AND OPEN ACCESS

The limit for the camera-ready version is 14 pages, excluding the
bibliography (so 2 pages extra compared with the submission).

The CPP proceedings will be published by the ACM, and authors of
accepted papers will be required to choose one of the following
publication options:
(1) Author retains copyright of the work and grants ACM a
non-exclusive permission-to-publish license and, optionally, licenses
the work under a Creative Commons license.
(2) Author retains copyright of the work and grants ACM an exclusive
permission-to-publish license.
(3) Author transfers copyright of the work to ACM.

For authors who can afford it, we recommend option 1, which will make
the paper Gold Open Access, and also encourage such authors to license
their work under the CC-BY license. ACM will charge you an article
processing fee for this option (currently, US$700), which you have to
pay directly with the ACM.

For everyone else, we recommend option (2), which is free and allows
you to achieve Green Open Access, by uploading a preprint of your
paper to a repository that guarantees permanent archival such as arXiv
(https://arxiv.org) or HAL (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr). This is
anyway a good idea for timely dissemination even if you chose option
(1). Ensuring timely dissemination is particularly important for this
edition, since, because of the very tight schedule, the official
proceedings might not be available in time for CPP.

The official CPP 2021 proceedings will also be available via SIGPLAN
OpenTOC (http://www.sigplan.org/OpenTOC/#cpp).

For ACM's take on this, see their Copyright Policy
(http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright-policy) and Author
Rights (http://authors.acm.org/main.html).

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Cătălin Hriţcu, MPI-SP, Germany (co-chair)
Andrei Popescu, University of Sheffield, UK (co-chair)
Reynald Affeldt, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
Technology (AIST), Japan
June Andronick, CSIRO's Data61 and UNSW, Australia
Arthur Azevedo de Amorim, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Joachim Breitner, DFINITY Foundation, Germany
Jesper Cockx, TU Delft, Netherlands
Cyril Cohen, Université Côte d’Azur, Inria, France
Nils Anders Danielsson, University of Gothenburg / Chalmers University
of Technology, Sweden
Brijesh Dongol, University of Surrey, UK
Floris van Doorn, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Yannick Forster, Saarland University, Germany
Shilpi Goel, Centaur Technology, Inc., USA
Chung-Kil Hur, Seoul National University, South Korea
Moa Johansson, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Ekaterina Komendantskaya, Heriot-Watt University, UK
Angeliki Koutsoukou-Argyraki, University of Cambridge, UK
Robert Y. Lewis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Hongjin Liang, Nanjing University, China
Andreas Lochbihler, Digital Asset GmbH, Switzerland
Petar Maksimović, Imperial College London, UK
William Mansky, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Anders Mörtberg, Stockholm University, Sweden
Sam Owre, SRI International, USA
Karl Palmskog, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Johannes Åman Pohjola, CSIRO's Data61 / University of New South Wales, Australia
Damien Pous, CNRS, ENS Lyon, France
Tahina Ramananandro, Microsoft Research, USA
Ilya Sergey, Yale-NUS College and National University of Singapore, Singapore
Natarajan Shankar, SRI International, USA
Kathrin Stark, Princeton University, USA
René Thiemann, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Amin Timany, Aarhus University, Denmark
Josef Urban, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Christoph Weidenbach, MPI-INF, Germany
Freek Wiedijk, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
Yannick Zakowski, University of Pennsylvania, USA

CONTACT

For any questions please contact the two PC chairs:
Catalin Hritcu <catalin.hritcu at gmail.com>,
Andrei Popescu <andrei.h.popescu at gmail.com>