The AWCVS conference -- Asian Working Conference on Verified Software -- was organized by UNU-IIST in Macao on 29 -31 October 2006, as an associated event of ICFEM 2006, the 8th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods.

The aim was to gather the top researchers in Asia to present their work and experience and to discuss possible coordinated research in the research area related to the Grand Challenge on Verified Software originated by Tony Hoare. The event turned out to be very successful (in fact much more successful than we expected). We received a great deal of encourge and advice from Tony Hoare, and strong support from Natarajan Shankar and Jim Woodcock. The vent attracted 34 submissions. The conference program consisted of three keynote talks by Dines Bjorner (Japan Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Japan), Natarajan Shankar (SRI International, US), and Jim Woodcock (York University, UK), 26 regular presentations, and an half day discussion session to identified pilot projects. As a result, we agreed on the following pilot projects

1. DBW, Drive By Wire (coordinator: Natarajan Shankar <shankar@csl.sri.com>) `
2. FIX Protocol (coordinator: Geoff Dromey <G.Dromey@griffith.edu.au> and Saad Zafar <S.Zafar@griffith.edu.au> )
3. TRDDC Insurance (coordinator: R. Venky <r.venky@tcs.com>)
4. Infusion Pump (coordinator: Geoff Dromey <G.Dromey@griffith.edu.au> and Saad Zafar <S.Zafar@griffith.edu.au> ))
5. The space-flight file-store (POSIX) (coordinator: Wang Ji <jiwang@ios.ac.cn>)
6. POS, a Trading System (coordinator: Zhiming Liu Z.Liu@iist.unu.edu) -- this is also the common example of the Component Modelling ontex (CoCoME http://agrausch.informatik.uni-kl.de/CoCoME, the CoCOME Forum is available at http://naf.informatik.uni-kl.de/php/phpBB2/index.php).

Further details about the pilot projects will be available at this site, and we call for contributions to this projects. If you would like to take part in some of these projects, please contact Zhiming Liu by Z.Liu@iist.unu.edu.

As a response to Tony Hoare’s grand challenge on The Verifying Compiler and a regional follow up discussion initiated at the IFIP Working Conference on Verified Software (VSTTE 2006: http://vstte.ethz.ch/) held in October 2005 in Zurich, Switzerland, this working conference aims to bring together experts in Asia on Theories, Tools and Experiments for Verified Software. Researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government are welcome to attend to exchange their results in these areas. In particular, we encourage leaders of research groups and project managers to come to the conference to plan collaboration in research and collective efforts for research funding. Attendants are strongly advised to read the keynotes, and other presentations at VSTTE 2006 that are relevant to their research area..

The first two days of the conference are technical presentations in the area. These will include keynote speeches from leading figures of the grand challenge project and regular presentations from the region. The third day will be used for forming working groups to discuss particular research problems and to establish a programme of continued collaboration and future meetings.

The working conference will focus on the development of methods for specifying, constructing and verifying highly dependable software. Topics include, but are not restricted to:

• Theories of software specification, design and verification
• Algorithms, methods and challenges in automated tool development including tools for verification, testing, maintenance and analysis of legacy code as well as new code
• Tool support for correctness preserving model transformations
• Case studies and experiments on application of tools in verified software
• Reports on verified code that can be contributed to the Repository of the Grand Challenge project

A submission can be quite short, and merely describe relevant research problems and the author's ambitions for solving them. The problems could be derived from their scientific or their practical interest. In other words, we encourage submissions on the forward look rather than completed. We are in favor of contributions that are written specially for the conference. Submission and registration are open to everyone. We intend to select suitable presentations for a publication in their revised and extended versions.

• Keijiro Araki, Kyushu University, Japan
• Geoff Dromey, Griffith University, Australia
• Kokichi Futatsugi, JAIST, Japan
• He Jifeng, East China Normal University, China
• Mathai Joseph, Tata Consultancy Services, India
• Zhiming Liu, UNU-IIST, Macao
• Mike Reed (Chair), UNU-IIST, Macao
• Abhik Roychoudhury, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Farn Wang, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
• Kwangkeun Yi, Seoul National University, Korea
• Jian Zhang, Institute of Software, China

• Tony Hoare, Microsoft Research, UK
• Jayadev Misra, University of Texas at Austin, US
• Jim Woodcock, University of York, UK

• Jim Woodcock, University of York, UK
• Natarajan Shankar, SRI International, US
• Dines Bjorner, JAIST, Japan