3rd Workshop on
 Artificial Intelligence and
fOrmal VERification, Logic,
Automata, and sYnthesis

OVERLAY @ GandALF 2021
September 22, 2021, Padova (Italy)
(unless held online, depending on the pandemic emergency situation)

The increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence techniques in safety-critical systems, employed in real world scenarios, requires the design of reliable, robust, and verifiable methodologies. Artificial Intelligence systems employed in such applications need to provide formal guarantees about their safety, increasing the need for a close interaction between the Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods scientific communities. To witness this increasing need, tools and methodologies integrating Formal Methods and Artificial Intelligence solutions are getting more and more attention.

The workshop is the main official initiative supported by the OVERLAY group. The event aims at establishing a stable, long-term scientific forum on relevant topics connected to the relationships between Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods, by providing a stimulating environment where researchers can discuss about opportunities and challenges at the border of the two areas.

Important goals of the workshop are (i) to encourage the ongoing interaction between the formal methods and artificial intelligence communities, (ii) to identify innovative tools and methodologies, and (iii) to elicit a discussion on open issues and new challenges.

This year edition will be held on September 22, 2021, and will be co-located with GandALF 2021, which is scheduled to be held in Padova, Italy (unless it will be an online event, depending on the pandemic emergency situation).

Proceedings now available online

The workshop proceedings are now available online on CEUR-WS!

Download

Important dates

Paper submission    July 11th, 2021 July 22nd, 2021
Notification    July 23rd, 2021 August 21st, 2021
Camera-ready    August 31st, 2021 September 5th, 2021
Workshop    September 22nd, 2021

Registration

Registration to the workshop is now open!

OVERLAY 2021 will take place in Padua (Italy) on September 22, 2021. The event is co-located with the 12th International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification (GandALF 2021).

GandALF 2021 and OVERLAY 2021 will take place in a mixed mode. You can choose to attend both events or the OVERLAY workshop only, either physically or online; the online mode uses Zoom to stream the conference sessions.

Important

For physical attendance, the EU Digital Covid Certificate (Green Pass) is mandatory.

The attendance to the OVERLAY workshop only is free of charge; however, it is possible to opt for the Premium Registration, which costs 55 euros, to support the community (there is no difference between a premium registration and a basic registration in terms of entitlements).

To register to the event use this link.

Invited speaker

Roderick Bloem

professor at
Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications
Graz, Austria

Title: Shield Synthesis for Safe Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
You have a reinforcement learning system? Sure, it works great, but does it give you any guarantees? I thought not.
We will describe methods to use reactive synthesis to construct runtime enforcement modules (shields) that can ensure that a system works correctly, even if the system has bugs. If the system doesn't have too many bugs, the behavior of the shielded system will stay close to the behavior of the original system. We will show extensions in probabilistic and timed settings.

Call for contributions

We accept extended abstracts (4 pages + references) focusing on the interaction between Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods. Invited talks will complement the presentations of contributed papers.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • automata theory
  • automated reasoning
  • automated planning and scheduling
  • controller synthesis
  • formal specification languages
  • formal verification
  • game theory
  • hybrid and discrete systems
  • logics in computer science
  • reactive synthesis
  • runtime verification and monitoring
  • specification and verification of machine learning systems
  • tools and applications

Contributed papers can present recent results at the border of the two fields, new research directions, challenges and perspectives. Presentation of results recently published in other scientific journals or conferences is also welcome.

We plan to include all papers in the Proceedings of the event, published at CEUR Workshop Proceedings . CEUR WS proceedings are archival proceedings indexed by DBLP and Scopus.

Submissions

Submitted papers should not exceed four (4) pages plus references. Authors are asked to use the CEURART LaTeX style, available here.

Submissions must be in PDF format and will be handled via the EasyChair Conference system at the following address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=overlay21 .

COVID-19 Information

Taking into account the emergency situation, the organizers of OVERLAY 2021 will closely monitor the evolution of the pandemic and will take all the necessary actions to guarantee a successful event.

In the case that an in-person event will not be possible, OVERLAY 2021 will be a hybrid or fully virtual conference. Updates on the organization mode will be published and advertised in due time.

In any case, OVERLAY 2021 will be a no-fee event.

Program Committee

Chairs
PC Members

Contacts

For more information email to overlay21@easychair.org.