Refinement is the term used to describe systematic and formal methods of specifying hard- and software and transforming the specifications into designs and implementations. The value of formal methods in producing reliable hard- and software is widely appreciated by academics and workers in industry, despite the fact that certain research areas, such as the application to industrial-scale problems, are still in their infancy. This volume contains the papers presented at the 5th Refinement Workshop held in London, 8-10 January 1992. Its theme was the theory and practice of software specifications, which is the transformation of formal software specifications into more correct specifications, designs and codes. This has been an important area of research for the last 5 years and the workshop addressed specific issues and problems related to it. Among the topics discussed in this volume are: the role of refinement in software development, parallel designs and implementations, methods and tools for verification of critical properties, refinement and confidentiality, concurrent processes as objects, the compliance of Ada programs with Z specifications and a tactic driven refinement tool. This is the latest refinement workshop proceedings to be published in the Workshops in Computing series (the 3rd and 4th workshops having appeared in 1990 and 1991 respectively). It will be of interest to academic and industrial researchers, postgraduate students and research-oriented developers in the computer industry.

The Sixth Refinement Workshop took place at City University in London from 5th to 7th January 1994. The present volume includes all of the papers which were submitted and accepted for presentation, together with two papers by invited speakers. The workshops in the series have generally occurred at one year intervals but in this last case a two year period had elapsed. These workshops have established themselves as an important event in the calendar for all those who are interested in progress in the underlying theory of refinement and in the take-up by industry of the methods supported by that theory. One of the proposed themes of the sixth workshop was the reporting of successful adoption in industry of rigorous software development methods. The programme committee was perhaps slightly disappointed by the response from industry to the call in this respect. However, the recent period could be characterised as one of consolidation, when those companies which have made the decision that formal development methods are important to their business have been adopting them where appropriate and finding them to be worthwhile. On the other hand,. the difficult economic climate which exists in most parts of the developed world is perhaps not the context within which companies still dubious about the benefits are goil'\g to opt for making major changes in their working practices.

The papers in this volume were presented at the First International Workshop on Larch, held at MIT Endicott House near Boston on 13-15 July 1992. Larch is a family of formal specification languages and tools, and this workshop was a forum for those who have designed the Larch languages, built tool support for them, particularly the Larch Prover, and used them to specify and reason about software and hardware systems. The Larch Project started in 1980, led by John Guttag at MIT and James Horning, then at Xerox/Palo Alto Research Center and now at Digital Equipment Corporation/Systems Research Center (DEC/SRC). Major applications have included VLSI circuit synthesis, medical device communications, compiler development and concurrent systems based on Lamport's TLA, as well as several applications to classical theorem proving and algebraic specification. Larch supports a two-tiered approach to specifying software and hardware modules. One tier of a specification is wrillen in the Larch Shared Language (LSL). An LSL specification describes mathematical abstractions such as sets, relations, and algebras; its semantics is defined in terms of first-order theories. The second tier is written in a Larch interface language, one designed for a specific programming language. An interface specification describes the effects of individual modules, e.g. state changes, resource allocation, and exceptions; its semantics is defined in terms of first-order predicates over two states, where state is defined in terms of the programming language's notion of state. Thus, LSL is programming language independent; a Larch interface language is programming language dependent.

This volume results from the four-day scientific Second International East/West Database Workshop which took place 25th-28th September 1994, in Klagenfurt, Austria, continuing a series of workshops started in Kiev in 1990 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 504, Springer, "Next Generation Information System Technology"). The aims of this workshop are twofold: first, to provide a forum for the presentation and in-depth discussion of scientific achievements in the field of advanced databases that will effectively improve the building and use of future information systems; second, to establish and increase communication between research communities which were formerly separated and, therefore, had only rare opportunities to interact. It should establish contacts between researchers from the East and from the West to make exchange of ideas possible and to trigger collaborations. However, it is not only political borders which change their perviousness as a result of -or giving rise to -new autonomies or new possibilities for interaction and collaboration. The same happens with the borders between scientific areas, in particular in the dynamically evolving areas of computer science. Databases and programming languages are integrated in object oriented databases, database and information retrieval technology form together the basis for modern (multimedia) information systems. Furthermore, the borders between different information systems change and allow various forms of collaboration while maintaining different degrees of autonomy. Heterogeneous and distributed databases are enabling technologies for these systems.

The Z notation has been developed at the Programming Research Group at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory and elsewhere for over a decade. It is now used by industry as part of the software (and hardware) development process in both Europe and the USA. It is currently undergoing BSI standardisation in the UK, and has been proposed for ISO standardisation internationally. In recent years researchers have begun to focus increasingly on the development of techniques and tools to encourage the wider application of Z and other formal methods and notations. This volume contains papers from the Seventh Annual Z User Meeting, held in London in December 1992. In contrast to previous years the meeting concentrated specifically on industrial applications of Z, and a high proportion of the participants came from an industrial background. The theme is well represented by the four invited papers. Three of these discuss ways in which formal methods are being introduced, and the fourth presents an international survey of industrial applications. It also provides a reminder of the improvements which are needed to make these methods an accepted part of software development. In addition the volume contains several submitted papers on the industrial use of Z, two of which discuss the key area of safety-critical applications. There are also a number of papers related to the recently-completed ZIP project. The papers cover all the main areas of the project including methods, tools, and the development of a Z Standard, the first publicly-available version of which was made available at the meeting. Finally the volume contains a select Z bibliography, and section on how to access information on Z through comp.specification.z, the international, computer-based USENET newsgroup. Z User Workshop, London 1992 provides an important overview of current research into industrial applications of Z, and will provide invaluable reading for researchers, postgraduate students and also potential industrial users of Z.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, ICFEM 2003, held in Singapore in November 2003. The 34 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on testing and validation, state diagrams, PVS/HOL, refinement, hybrid systems, Z/Object-Z, Petri nets, timed automata, system modelling and checking, and semantics and synthesis.

This volume results from the regular sessions of the Second International Workshop of the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter "Advances in Databases and Information Systems" (ADBIS'95) that took place 27th-30th June 1995, in Moscow, Russia. ADBIS'95 continues a series of annual Workshops on Advances in Databases and Information Systems organized by the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter in cooperation with the Russian Founda tion for Basic Research. Past successful ADBIS conferences include the ADBIS'93 and ADBIS'94 Workshops that took place in Moscow. The aims of these workshops are to provide a forum for the presentation and in-depth discussion of advanced research directions that will effectively improve the building and use of future information systems and to increase communication between the Eastern and Western research communities which were formerly separated and still have only rare possibilities to interact. Improving of the contacts and exchange of ideas between researchers from the East and from the West will eventually lead to better collaboration between them. The ADBIS'95 Call for Submissions attracted 60 submissions from 15 countries of which 35 submissions were accepted for presentation at the regular sessions, 9 as posters, and 7 as presentations for a special session for the Information Systems for Science. This volume contains the papers presented in the regular sessions.