This award will support student travel to the fifth Midwest Verification Day (MVD), to be held at the University of Illinois at Chicago in September 2013. MVD is an informal regional workshop with the goal of cultivating a regional research network in verification and formal methods. The funds will help support U.S. students, focusing on Ph.D. students at an advanced stage in their program and students who would otherwise not be able to attend MVD. Supporting student travel to attend professional conferences and workshops is a very important mission of the NSF. Broader impacts include training the next generation of researchers in this important research area.
MVD is an informal regional workshop on hardware and software verification, with verification understood in a broad sense. Maintopics of interest included deductive verification, model checking, static analysis, abstract interpretation, runtime verification, languagebased verification, and modelbased testing. The workshop, loosely modeled after similar successful events for the Midwest region The workshop was strongly student-oriented provided a forum for graduate and undergraduate students to present their research work and ideas to other students and faculty in an informal and relaxed setting, share suggestions and ideas on other participants' work, early drafts of papers, and presentations, develop early network of professional acquaintances that might facilitate later research collaborations and access to internships, graduate programs (for undergraduate students), postdoc positions, and job opportunities. We facilitated the participation of needier students from Midwestern, Colorado, and Utah universities by means of travel and subsistence grants. The grants have been assigned based both on merit and financial need, based on support letters written by academic advisers. Higher priority was assigned to students giving presentations. Strong emphasis was put on supporting students from underrepresented groups. Undergraduates considering pursuing verification and formal methods at the graduate level have also been particularly encouraged to attend. The organizers advertised that on the workshop's website and contacted in advance colleagues at interested institutions, urging them to encourage such students to present and participate.
