Maximum 2 pages

The aim of the Action is to extend and co-ordinate European research activities on the theory and application of behavioural types for the development and runtime management of concurrent and distributed systems with formal safety assurance over a wide range of properties, resulting in the large-scale experiments and deployment of programming languages and tools based on behavioural type systems.

The main objective of this Action is to develop the domain of certified software and software mechanisms for distributed services which may possibly be in global scale, providing languages and tools for automatically checking behavioural properties of concurrent and distributed software systems, specified with simple yet expressive type languages. Successful research in this area will have a deep and broad impact on the practice of software development, and on the scientific theories underlying our understanding of distributed computing systems.

The Action has the following sub-objectives:

O1. Co-ordinate European research activity on the theory and application of behavioural type systems, and the deployment of programming languages and tools based on them, organised into the following themes which will each have a Working Group.

• Theoretical Foundations

• Security

• Programming Languages

• Tools and Applications

O2. Build an effective working community of European researchers in this area, by means of the following activities:

• Regular meetings of the Management Committee and the Working Groups

• Annual workshops (following a successful workshop in April 2011)

• Training schools for PhD students and early-career researchers

• Short-term scientific missions between institutions, especially for PhD students and early-career researchers

• Encourage the use of bi-national joint PhD programmes between institutions in the Action.

• Actively seeking to increase the membership of the Action

O3. Encourage the industrial adoption of advanced programming languages and tools, by working with existing industrial contacts and developing new ones.

The scientific objectives will be achieved through close collaboration between the participants in the Action. This will include exchange of PhD students and researchers through Short-Term Scientific Missions, and annual workshops that will report on the latest research results and initiate new collaboration activities. The Action will enable PhD students and early-career researchers to develop and share their expertise, and will contribute to creating new connections between established researchers.

The following specific objectives, with quantitative targets where appropriate, are planned. The targets will be used by the Management Committee to monitor the progress of the Action.

At Action level:

1. The Action will involve at least 36 academic and research institutions in 14 countries (30 institutions in 12 countries have already expressed interest in this Action).
2. The activities of the Action will include participation by at least 9 industrial collaborators (6 companies have already expressed interest) and a large-scale academic development project. Many of them are actively engaged in the deployment of behavioural types technologies in their development projects.
3. At least 6 collaborative, transnational projects on specific topics relating to the Action will be submitted to national and European programmes.
4. Management Committee meetings will be held annually.
5. A project website listing upcoming and past activities, paper abstracts and presentations will be prepared by the Action participants.
6. There will be an annual workshop which serves as a meeting for all Action participants and as a peer-reviewed symposium.
7. There will be a total of at least 100 publications in international peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings as a result of the scientific projects and annual workshops of the Action.
8. There will be at least 120 Short-Term Scientific Missions within the Action.
9. There will be a final report that describes the outcomes and successes of the Action.

At the level of Working Groups:

1. Working Group meetings will be held annually, in conjunction with the annual workshops.
2. Each Working Group will produce a state-of-the-art report during the first year of the Action, and thereafter an annual progress report.
3. Working groups will organise special sessions, for example tutorials or focussed discussion meetings, at international conferences.

This Action will co-ordinate European research in the field of behavioural types for concurrent and distributed software systems. It will facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange between research centres across Europe, thus maximising the benefits of various national research programmes. This in turn will consolidate the internationally leading position of the European research community in this area.

The software industry (including open source community), for which programming communication and concurrency is one of the largest challenges at present and in near future, will benefit from improved theories, programming languages, methodologies and tools, which will make it easier to develop correct and safety-assured software systems that rely on concurrency, distribution and communication. This benefit will be seen at a range of scales, from single applications running on multi-core chips through to global service-oriented systems.

Teaching programmes at the participating institutions will benefit from the possibility of offering advanced courses based on the latest research in the topics of the Action. This includes the potential for academic staff to deliver courses at other institutions, based on contacts developed through the Action and taking advantage of existing academic exchange schemes such as Erasmus.

Society will benefit from increased reliability of the essential technological infrastructure which are inevitably based on concurrent and distributed computing systems.

• Reflect on the likely stakeholders and end users that will exploit the expected results. Indicate whether they were involved in the preparation of the proposal.

The benefits of the Action, described in the previous section, will be felt by the following groups and end users.

• The scientific community.
• The software industry.
• Society as a whole.

This proposal has been prepared by members of the scientific community, in consultation with representatives of the software industry who are already actively involved in collaborative projects with participants in the Action.

Simon: Please precede remarks with your name.

Simon: I have put text from the outline proposal into this section. Please improve it!

Luca: In O1, “organized” or “organized”?

Hans: In addition to the benefits that result from coordination of research, concrete outcomes of the Action will be software tools for program analysis using behavioural types and proposals for a new international standardisation for quality assurance and certification of software components.

Emilio: I'm wondering if in C.4 of part I we could mention that the coordinated research done in BETTY could have an impact in our teaching practice; for instance one could think of advanced MSc courses taught in several universities (possibly held by hosting lecturers from other institutions or even from industry?). I know this is not always easy to achieve, but may be it could be done in some cases.

Pawel: (Deliverables D5 and D6): The proposal states “open-source implementations of programming languages and tools” as example deliverables of the COST Action. However, COST does not fund the actual research work, e.g. in terms of PhD studentships. So, does COST really expect any deliverables of this sort?

Simon: I think that several of the deliverables are deliverables from the research that is being coordinated (not funded) by the COST. Is this the correct interpretation to use?

Simon: The other COST proposals that we have been looking at don't mention deliverables here. So I am removing them, which avoids the question of whether research outputs from other projects can be deliverables of the Action.