Conference announcements
![[FOSDEM logo]](/~dirk/.image/going-to-fosdem.png)
![[Ada-Belgium logo]](/~dirk/.image/ada-belgium-color-small.gif)
![[Ada coin]](http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/pictures/ada-strong-305-color.png)
The Free and Open Source Developers' Meeting
(FOSDEM)
is an annual event held in Brussels, Belgium, in February.
The 2013 edition will take place on Saturday the 2nd and Sunday the 3th
of February.
Ada-Belgium
has organized a series of presentations related to
Ada, to be held in a dedicated Developer Room, on the second day of
the event.
Ada is a general-purpose language originally designed for safety- and mission-critical software engineering. It is used extensively in air traffic control, rail transportation, aerospace, nuclear, financial services and medical devices. The new Ada 2012 standard has been finalized and was published by ISO in December 2012. As with the Ada 1995 and Ada 2005 standards, the new Ada 2012 standard already starts to spread thanks to the advent of its first full implementation which is none other than the GNU Compiler Collection (GNAT).
![[In Cooperation with Ada-Europe]](/~dirk/.image/ICWAE.png)
This DevRoom aims to present the possibilities offered by the Ada Language (object-oriented, multicore, embedded programming) as well as some of the many exciting projects using Ada. A one-page call for participation is available giving an overview of the Ada DevRoom program; it can be used to help announcing the event.
Some pictures related to the Ada DevRoom at FOSDEM 2013 are available. If you were there and have additional pictures you would like to share, then feel free to contact me (see below).
Welcome to the Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2013, which is organized by Ada-Belgium in cooperation with Ada-Europe. Ada-Belgium and Ada-Europe are both non-profit organizations set to promote the use of Ada, and to disseminate the knowledge of it into academic, research and industrial establishments in Belgium and Europe, resp. Ada-Europe has member-organizations, such as Ada-Belgium, in various countries. More information on this event is available on the Ada-Belgium web-site (see link).
More information:
Overview of the main features of the Ada language, with special emphasis on those features that make it especially attractive for free software development. Ada is a feature-rich language, but what really makes Ada stand-out is that the features are nicely integrated towards serving the goals of software engineering. If you prefer to spend your time on designing elegant solutions rather than on low-level debugging, if you think that software should not fail, if you like to build programs from readily available components that you can trust, you should really consider Ada!
More information:
Eurocontrol provides pan-European Air Traffic Management services and uses various open source tools to ensure high software quality. We will discuss the use of gcc, valgrind, Ada and other tools for the detection of memory management bugs, race conditions and performance issues. We will cover Valgrind tools and new functionality in more detail.
More information:
This presentation explains and demonstrates how Ada code can be embedded into Android devices. The talk will be an introduction to programming Android devices in Ada. The Android framework can be used to develop a part of the application (such as the user interface), but you can still benefit from Ada's reliability and advanced software engineering principles for the application logic (for example, control algorithms or image processing). The presentation will describe and demonstrate how easy it is to follow this development approach with Ada.
More information:
Ada is one of very few programming languages that support multithreading as part of the language, as opposed to libraries. As a consequence, the multithreading facilities use simple, high-level abstractions: tasks and protected objects, rather than low-level library calls. Ada allows beginners and younger programmers to write multithreading programs. If you come prepared with an Ada compiler on your laptop, you can learn by doing in this interactive, hands-on session, and unleash the full power of your multicore processor!
More information:
Ada has a long record of being ahead of its time: Ada 83 had templates and multithreading, that appeared in other mainstream languages nearly 15 years later. The latest incarnation of the language, officially standardized by ISO in December 2012, continues with this tradition. From programming by contract to multicore support, with sophisticated memory management schemes, and more, Ada is steaming ahead of the crowd!
More information:
This talk presents the design and usage of a dimensionality checking system in Ada 2012. The purpose of dimensional analysis is to verify dimension consistency within physical relations, preventing errors such as the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter because one module used metric units and another one imperial units. The presentation will describe how to perform compile-time checks to verify the dimensional consistency of physical computations, allowing the user to define his own system of units.
More information:
Alice is an Open Source PBX management application aimed at hosted reception facilities. Taming wild PBXes and meeting the fuzzy real-time requirements of human impatience are some of the challenges you face, when you build such systems. Using the Asterisk PBX, the Ada language, and AWS - the Ada Web Server, we take on the modern web armed with HTML5, Dart and WebSockets, to make Alice a reliable, commercial service for customers who consider answering the phone mission critical. I will present some examples of how Ada has made the construction of Alice - if not a walk in the park, then at least - reasonably easy and painless. During the presentation I plan to have a live example of Alice answering phones on a Raspberry Pi in front of the audience.
More information:
The Hi-Lite Project - Combining Formal Program Verification and Testing
Verification activities mandated for critical software are essential to
achieve the required level of confidence expected in life-critical or
business-critical software. They are becoming increasingly costly as,
over time, they require the development and maintenance of a large
body of functional and robustness tests on larger and more complex
applications. Formal program verification offers a way to reduce these
costs while providing stronger guarantees than testing. Addressing
verification activities with formal verification is supported by
recent standards such as DO-178C for software development in avionics.
In the Hi-Lite project, we pursue the integration of formal
verification with testing for projects developed in C or Ada.
We present an open source verification framework based on the GNAT
compiler for Ada, which allows combining the results of testing and
formal verification of Ada programs. We benefit from the recent
update of the Ada language, which includes richer expressions and
contracts on functions. We show that this combination of verification
techniques can be as strong as testing alone, while allowing the user
to choose the most cost-effective technique for every function.
More information:
Dirk Craeynest has been involved with the Ada programming language and
related technology for more than 3 decades. After obtaining degrees
in mathematics and computer science, he was involved in research and
teaching at the Computer Science Department of the Leuven university.
Since 1995, he works mainly on large Ada-related software projects in
industry.
Dirk is co-founder and President of the Ada-Belgium Organization,
Vice-President of Ada-Europe (federation of national Ada organizations),
Editorial Board member of the quarterly Ada User Journal, member of
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG9 (working group managing the Ada programming
language standard), and officer in the Executive Committee of ACM
SIGAda (ACM's Special Interest Group in Ada). He is involved in the
organization of several annual international events, such as
Ada-Europe's Conferences on Reliable Software Technologies and
ACM SIGAda's Conferences on Ada and Related Technologies.
Jean-Pierre Rosen graduated from ENST (French engineering school) in
1975, and obtained PhD in 1986. He started as a software engineer at
the computing center of ENST, then as Professor, where he was
responsible for the teaching of Software Engineering and Ada. He has
formed Adalog, a company specialized in high level training,
consultancy and software development in the fields of Ada and
associated technologies (software engineering, object oriented
methodologies).
Jean-Pierre Rosen is Chairman of the AFNOR (French standardization body)
group for Ada and a member of the ARG (Ada Rapporteur Group), the group
of experts in charge of maintenance and evolution of the Ada language.
He was a member of the expert team who controlled the development of the
validation suite for Ada 95. He is the author of "Methodes de Genie
Logiciel avec Ada 95" (Software Engineering Methods with Ada 95) and
"HOOD: an industrial approach for software development".
Philippe Waroquiers leads software development of the Flow Management and Flight Plan processing applications at Eurocontrol, the European air traffic control agency with 39 member states. During his free time, he participates in Valgrind development.
José F. Ruiz is a Senior Software Engineer who joined AdaCore in 2002. He received his Ph.D. Degree from the Technical University of Madrid for his work in the field of real-time and multimedia systems, including scheduling policies and resource management in operating systems. He is a specialist in embedded real-time high-integrity systems in Ada, an area where he has been working for more than 15 years, having authored/coauthored over 30 papers in those domains.
Ludovic Brenta has been programming since 1989 and using GNU/Linux since
1994.
He graduated from INSA Lyon in industrial engineering in 1996 and
has been a software engineer ever since. In 2002, dissatisfied with the
languages he used, he started looking for safer alternatives and
discovered Ada, which he taught himself with help from the Free Software
community. He started giving back in 2003 when he adopted most of the
Ada packages in Debian and has been an official Debian Developer since
2006.
Kim Rostgaard Christensen is a software engineer graduated from the Technical University of Denmark who is active an passionate in using, improving and developing open source software. He has been using Ada for about six years, and professionally for the past year. Co-founder of AdaHeads K/S, and member of Ada-Denmark. His interest in Ada lies in its application in real-time systems, embedded systems and safety-critical systems.
Valentine Reboul joined AdaCore in 2012 after 3 years of experience in critical systems (Air Traffic Flow Management and Railway automation solutions). She now participates in the "Qualifying Machine" research project and is involved in training sessions given about the Ada Language. She holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique et de Mathématiques Appliquées (Grenoble, France).
A one-page preliminary call for participation [1] is available. It can be used to help announcing the event. [1] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/13/130203-fosdem-pcfpart.pdf
From: dirk@vana.cs.kuleuven.be. (Dirk Craeynest)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,fr.comp.lang.ada
Subject: Call for Talks - Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2013, Brussels
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 22:32:54 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Ada-Belgium, c/o Dept. of Computer Science, KU Leuven
Summary: Plan now to attend! Or even better: propose a talk!
Keywords: Ada,open source,free software,technical presentations,FOSDEM
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Preliminary Announcement and Call for Talks
4th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2013
Sunday 3 February 2013, Brussels, Belgium
Organized in cooperation with Ada-Europe
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/13/130203-fosdem.html
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Ada-Belgium [1] is pleased to announce that there will be a one-day Ada
Developer Room on Sunday 3 February 2013 at FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels,
Belgium. This Ada DevRoom is once more organized in cooperation with
Ada-Europe [2].
FOSDEM [3], the Free and Open source Software Developers' European
Meeting, is a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event organized
each February in Brussels, Belgium.
The goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and
communities a place to meet with other developers and projects, to be
informed about the latest developments in the Free Software and Open
Source world, to attend interesting talks and presentations held in
large conference rooms by Free Software and Open Source project leaders
and committers on various topics, and to promote the development and
the benefits of Free Software and Open Source solutions.
At previous FOSDEM events, Ada-Belgium has organized some very well
attended Ada Developer Rooms, offering a full day program in 2006 [4],
a two-day program in 2009 [5], and another full day program in 2012
[6]. One of our important goals is to present Ada also to people
outside the traditional Ada community.
Our proposal for another dedicated Ada DevRoom was accepted recently,
and now work continues to prepare the detailed program. We most
probably will have a total of 8 schedulable hours between 09:00
and 17:00. More information will be posted later on the dedicated
web-page on the Ada-Belgium site, and final announcements will of
course also be sent to various lists and newsgroups.
Ada-Belgium calls on you to:
- inform us at ada-belgium-board@cs.kuleuven.be about specific
presentations you would like to hear in this Ada DevRoom;
- for bonus points, subscribe to the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list [7]
to discuss and help organize the details;
- for more bonus points, be a speaker: the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list
is the place to be!
We'd like to put together a draft schedule by the end of November.
So, please act ASAP.
We look forward to lots of feedback!
Dirk Craeynest
Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be (for Ada-Belgium/-Europe/SIGAda/WG9 mail)
[1] <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium>
[2] <http://www.ada-europe.org>
[3] <https://fosdem.org>
[4] <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/06/060226-fosdem.html>
[5] <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem.html>
[6] <http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/12/120204-fosdem.html>
[7] <http://listserv.cc.kuleuven.be/archives/adafosdem.html>
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To the Ada-Belgium home page.
Last update: 2013/02/11.
Dirk Craeynest