Giorgio Levi

During the last year we had several events, for some of which you can find a report in this issue, on the subject of relating some (apparently) different techniques for proving properties of programs and for analyzing programs. In particular, one very interesting workshop on "Verification, model checking and abstract interpretation'' has been recently organized as a post-conference workshop of ILPS'97 (see the report by Annalisa Bossi). One really nice result from the workshop was the realization that model checking seems to be a potentially very successful (and useful) application of logic programming. Another interesting result was to improve the understanding of the relation between verification techniques (see the survey by Elena Marchiori) and abstract interpretation.

ILPS'97 gave us a chance to get a better understanding of analysis and proof methods through some very interesting tutorials and invited talks on model checking, set-based analysis and analysis methods based on formal language theory. I will try to have some surveys on these subjects in the next issue of the Newsletter.

In the area of abstract interpretation there are several recent results which go in the direction of making more systematic the design of abstract domains with suitable semantic properties. The results have been used to reconstruct several known domains, but should in principle be useful to derive new interesting domains. You can find more information on the subject in the survey on domain refinement operators by Roberto Giacobazzi.

The area had no specific area meeting this year, because there were already many events. In September 1998, the "natural'' conferences for the area (SAS, PLILP and ALP) will meet together in Pisa, and this will also officially be the area meeting. The event will also have post-conference workshops. I invite everybody to submit papers and workshop proposals.

Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita di Pisa,

Pisa, Italy

levi@di.unipi.it