Proceedings of the ACM SIGAda annual international conference on SIGAda

Abstract

Welcome to the 2010 Annual International Conference of ACM's Special Interest Group on Ada (SIGAda), being held in the suburb of Washington, D.C. area, USA at the Hyatt Fair Lakes Hotel. This is a beautiful spot located in Fairfax, Virginia. 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 system software integrity assurance gained from his experience with aviation systems. A second speaker will present his thoughts on the use of Ada in security systems with a specific focus on Tokeneer. We have invited speakers to pass along their experience in developing large scale, high reliability systems. We have introduced three panel discussions as a new edition to this year's conference. Representatives from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology will discuss the potential benefits of software labels. Our second panel will address software security in depth and will be followed by a workshop that should challenge the audience. The final panel will address mitigating risks to the enterprise by software assurance and is moderated by a software leader at the Department of Homeland Security. 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 highly reliable and secure 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. The reception will be further complemented by the Asian Indian Dance and Music performances. Wednesday evening will have various Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions arranged around topics of specific interest. 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 2010 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 historic capital 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.