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NewsLetter 30 - September 28, 2000:


Proceedings for Spin2000

The proceedings for the last Spin workshop at Stanford, are available in book-form from online bookstores such as www.amazon.com as Springer LNCS Vol. 1885, or as individual papers in pdf format in the online proceedings repository:

	
	http://netlib.bell-labs.com/netlib/spin/ws00/program2000.html

Call for Papers for Spin2001

The 8th Spin Workshop will be held May 19-20, 2001 in Toronto, as a co-located event of the large International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE2001:

	
	http://www.csr.uvic.ca/icse2001/
The call for papers is http://www.cis.ksu.edu/santos/spin2001/cfp.html.

Papers can be submitted in postscript form to spin2001@cis.ksu.edu before January 29, 2001 (giving you four months to complete your contribution...). Notifications of acceptance are sent out on February 26 and camera ready versions of the accepted papers will be due March 12, 2001.

General chair for the Spin2001 workshop is Moshe Vardi from Rice University. The workshop organizers are Matt Dwyer (dwyer@cis.ksu.edu) from the Bandera group at Kansas State University and Marsha Chechick (chechik@cs.toronto.edu) from Toronto University.

Spin Version 4.0

The version of Spin that is currently in the distribution is a stable version 3.4.1. This version contains the new model slicing algorithm announced in the previous newsletter (as spin option -A), but not yet Kousha Etessami's new algorithm for generating automata from LTL formulae. (That algorithm remains available via the webserver at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/spin/eqltl.html though.)

Barring smaller fixes, we will next move to Spin version 4.0. Version 4 contains a more sweeping extension: direct support for embedded C-code that becomes a full part of the model (i.e., state changes in the C-code can be tracked as part of the state vector). The extension greatly simplifies model extraction from applications written in ANSI-standard C. Spin version 4 will remain fully compatible with the existing releases of Spin: none of the existing models will need any change. It is still too early to tell when we will be able to distribute the new version. More details will follow as they become available.


End of Newsletter Nr. 30.

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