A PhD Summer School
Formal methods specification and verification
Martin Henson
University of Essex

CoLogNET is supporting an exciting PhD Summer School in June 2004 on the subject of Logics of Specification Languages. The idea for this grew out of two recent issues of the journal Computing and Informatics last year (Volume 22, No. 3 and Volume 22, No. 4) which contain a number of invited articles concerning logics and foundations of the major formal specification languages for software systems. The authors of these papers, leading authorities in logics for nine such languages, will each be presenting an extended lecture series during this two-week summer school. The aim is to educate PhD students, young researchers and academics in an intensive but stimulating program of teaching events.

The School will be taking place in the Congress Centre Academia in Stara Lesna, Slovakia. The centre is situated at the foot of the Lomnicky peak in the eastern part of the Vysoke Tatry Mountains, close to the Tatra National Park, and in quiet surroundings. It should be an ideal and beautiful location for a most interesting meeting.

The timing and the location of this Summer School is no coincidence: in May 10 more countries: Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, join the European Union. It is anticipated and hoped that students and researchers from all these countries will attend.

Each of the nine lecture series will feature five 70 minute lectures. The full program and the tutors are as follows:
- "The Expressive Power of Abstract-State Machines", Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Germany
- "Foundations of the B method", Dominique Mery, Universite Henri Poincare, France
- "CafeOBJ: Logical Foundations and Methodologies", Razvan Diaconescu, Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, Romania
- "CASL - The Common Algebraic Specification Language: language, semantics, proof calculus, tools", Till Mossakowski, University of Bremen, Germany
- "Duration Calculus: A formal approach to real-time systems", Michael R. Hansen, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
- "The Logic of the RAISE Specification Language", Chris George, United Nations University, Macau
- "Specifying Systems in TLA+", Stephan Merz, INRIA Lorraine, France
- "VDM in theory and practice", John Fitzgerald, University of Newcastle, United Kingdom
- "Z logic: applications and consequences", Steve Reeves, University of Waikato, New Zealand.

The School is being organized by Profs Dines Bjorner (DTU, Denmark), Martin Henson (Essex, UK) and Branislav Rovan (Comenius University, Slovakia) and will be held between the 6th and 19th of June; further details, and the application form, can be found at http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/henson/sssl. Enquiries should be sent to Dusan Guller: guller@fmph.uniba.sk."