Mr.TRAN,Hoa Nhat(3rd year doctral student in AOKI Lab.of Security and Networks Area) and Prof.Toshiaki Aoki,Security and Networks Area, received best paper award in APSEC 2017.

APSEC (Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference) is an international conference focusing on software engineering. This was the 24th and held in Nanjing, China. 188 papers were submitted from all over the world (43countries) and 51 papers were accepted this year. The best 10 papers were on the table of the best paper awards according to the score of the paper reviews. Then, 5 papers were nominated by program commitee members' voting. Finally, 3 papers were awarded after hearing their presentations.

■Date Awarded
December 8, 2017

■Title
Domain-Specific Language Facilitates Scheduling in Model Checking

■Authors
Nhat-Hoa Tran, Yuki Chiba and Toshiaki Aoki

■Abstract
A concurrent system consists of multiple processes that are run simultaneously. The execution orders of these processes are defined by a scheduler. In model checking techniques, the scheduling policy is closely related to a search algorithm that explores all of system states. To ensure the correctness of the system, the scheduling policy needs to be taken into account during the verification. Current approaches, which use fixed strategies, are only capable of limited kinds of policies and are difficult to extend to handle the variations of the schedulers. To address these problems, we propose a method using a domain-specific language (DSL) for the succinct specification of different scheduling policies. Necessary artifacts are automatically generated from the specification of the policy to analyze the system. We also propose a search algorithm for exploring the system states. Based on this method, we develop a tool to verify the system with different scheduling policies. Our experiments show that we could serve the variations of the schedulers easily and verify systems accurately.

■Comment
I am very honored and grateful to be selected as a recipient of the APSEC Best Paper Award. First of all, I would like to express my greatest gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Toshiaki Aoki, who advised me during my research. His support creates a great environment to encourage me both in studying and in social life. I am also grateful to Dr. Yuki Chiba and all lab members for their comments and discussions. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family members for their infinite love, which is the biggest encouragement for my study.

December 13,2017