Proceedings of the ACM SIGAda annual international conference on Ada and related technologies

Abstract

Welcome to the 2009 Annual International Conference of ACM's Special Interest Group on Ada (SIGAda), being held in the Tampa Bay area, USA at the Hilton St Petersburg Bayfront hotel. This is a beautiful spot located directly on Tampa Bay, Florida. Our location is very close to the Tampa Airport and approximately 1-1/2 hours away from the Orlando International Airport and its associated theme parks. The Tampa Bay area itself has the Busch Gardens theme park, the Salvador Dali museum, and a multitude of beaches on the Gulf coast. This year's conference concentrates on software reliability, safety, and security as among the most critical requirements of contemporary software. The conference starts with two days of multi track tutorials to educate attendees on a variety of technologies to address these same software development topics. This is followed by three days of technical papers, keynotes, and invited presentations. The keynote speakers all have extensive experience in these areas and have been selected to provide attendees with a variety of perspectives on developing high reliability systems. We have a speaker on developing both safety and security certifiable systems. His experience is with both medical safety devices and security based systems developed to NSA requirements. A second speaker will present his experience in developing and maintaining long lived safety systems for air traffic control/management for both airports and/or in route management. Our third speaker has been involved as both a government representative and now DOD contractor in developing high reliability systems. This talk will educate attendees on these two different sides of the aisle perspectives. Further we have a special invited speaker who is an active participant on SC-205/WG-71 DO-178C committee to present to us the latest development in air safety standards as we move from the established DO-178B standard to the new DO-178C standard. During the three days of the main conference schedule you will hear from a variety of presenters that have both project experience and research results in developing high reliability software. The selected papers were all double blind reviewed to provide you with the very best in presentations for the time you spend at this year's conference. We think many papers will provide information you can directly apply as lessons learned to your own software development projects. Others may be of interest as technologies that have been tested and worth following in the future. There will be a reception on Tuesday evening to both relax and meet with other attendees to have informal discussions on like minded topics. Wednesday evening will have various Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions arranged around topics of specific interest so that attendees can make the most of their stay and have discussions on topics that directly interest them and are helpful for the work they are performing for their companies today. Finally, we hope SIGAda 2009 provides you an outstanding opportunity for rewarding affiliation with colleagues in industry, academia, and government -- discussions in the hall, informal meal-time meetings, and even during the more relaxed moments we make for socializing in this wonderful southern city. If you don't realize it already, you will learn that these associations can be as valuable as the technical program at professional conferences, and often extend the experience after you return home.