Special Section Editorial Board

The IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems announces a forthcoming special section on Formal Approach to be published in May 2014.

Formal methods and techniques play a key role in designing and developing highly reliable information systems and embedded systems. The last decades have seen various new techniques and profound theoretical results using formal methods in surprisingly many fields such as modeling, requirements analysis, specification, automatic generation of codes, test, verification, maintenance, and reuse. They are rapidly extending their application domains as a result of the recent growth of information and communication technologies.

The Special Section on Formal Approach aims at stimulating research on formal approach to information systems and embedded systems, ranging from fundamental theory to case studies in practical systems. Our emphasis is put on the cross-fertilization of related research fields and encouragement of young researchers.

Topics:

The major topics are listed below, but we solicit submissions in all areas of formal approaches, i.e., first to formalize information systems, embedded systems, and their environment, next to analyze their behavior and to derive their properties rigorously, and then to solve various problems in designing and managing the systems.

Theoretical foundations: all aspects of theory related to formal description and verification for structure and behavior of systems.
Formal techniques: techniques for formally describing and analyzing software and hardware.
Formal tools: tools based on formal methods such as model checker, theorem prover, and static and dynamic analysis.
Applications: practical experiences applying formal methods to information systems and embedded systems.

Submission Instructions:

The deadline for submission is July 17, 2013, 23:59 JST. Manuscripts should be carefully prepared according to the guideline in the ``Information for Authors'' (available at http://www.ieice.org/eng/shiori/mokuji_iss.html). The preferred length of the manuscript is 8 pages. Only electronic submission through the web page is accepted.

Submit a complete paper and electronic files (TeX/Word files, figures, authors' photos and biography) for publishing using the IEICE Web site https://review.ieice.org/regist_e.aspx. Authors should choose ``[Special FO] Formal Approach'' as a type of ``Journal/Section'' on the online screen.
Send signed and completed forms of ``Copyright Transfer and Page Charge Agreement'' and ``Confirmation Sheet of Manuscript Registration'' (which will be generated when you submit a paper) by e-mail (preferable) or postal mail to Dr. Yoshinao Isobe, the editor in chief. Please mark ``[Special FO] Formal Approach'' on the envelope.

Editorial Committee:

Guest Editor in Chief:	Yoshinao Isobe (AIST)
Guest Editors:	Kozo Okano (Osaka University)
	Yoshinobu Kawabe (Aichi Institute of Technology)
	Tatsuhiro Tsuchiya (Osaka Univ.)
Members:	Toshiaki Aoki (JAIST)
	Ichiro Hasuo (The University of Tokyo)
	Fuyuki Ishikawa (National Institute of Infomatics)
	Koichi Kobayashi (JAIST)
	Hironobu Kuruma (Hitachi, Ltd.)
	Masaki Nakamura (Toyama Prefectural University)
	Tachio Terauchi (Nagoya University)

All inquiries should be sent to the guest editor in chief:

Yoshinao Isobe

Research Institute for Secure Systems, AIST

Tsukuba Central 2, 1-1-1, Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8568, Japan

FAX: +81-29-861-5285

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline:	July 17, 2013, 23:59JST(GMT+9)
First Notification:	September 12, 2013
Revised Version Deadline:	November 12, 2013
Final Notification:	December 20, 2013

Important Notice:

At least one of the authors must be an IEICE member when the manuscript is submitted for review. For the application of IEICE membership, visit this page.
If accepted for publication, authors are required to pay the page charges covering pat of the cost of publication.