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CALL FOR PAPERS - OVERLAY 2019
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First Workshop on
Artificial Intelligence and
fOrmal VERification, Logic, Automata, and sYnthesis
(OVERLAY)

18th International Conference of
the Italian Association for
Artificial Intelligence (AIIA 2019)

November 19-22 2019, Rende (Italy)

https://overlay.uniud.it/workshop/2019/

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The WS is partially supported by Department of Mathematics, University of Padova.

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The increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence techniques in safety-critical
systems, employed in real world scenarios, requires the design of reliable,
robust and verifiable methodologies. AI systems employed in such applications
need to provide formal guarantees about their safety, increasing the need for a
synergic collaboration between the AI and Formal Methods scientific communities.
Despite this increasing need, tools and methodologies integrating Formal Methods
and Artificial Intelligence solutions have received relatively little attention.

Aware of this scenario, the combined efforts of notable Italian researchers,
that have been collaborating for several years in complementary fields such as
specification, verification, and synthesis of reactive systems, artificial
intelligence, controller synthesis, etc., has led to the creation of a new
research group on Artificial Intelligence and fOrmal VERification, Logic,
Automata, and sYnthesis (OVERLAY - https://overlay.uniud.it/). The group is
structured in four areas: Formal Methods, Automated Planning, Discrete and
Continuous Hybrid Systems, Tools and Applications. In general, it aims at
investigating novel methods and algorithms supporting the design and development
of autonomous safety-critical systems.

The workshop, part of the AIxIA 2019 conference, is the first official
initiative supported by OVERLAY, presenting the research group and its current
results to the Italian AI scientific community. The event aims at establishing a
stable, long-term scientific forum on relevant topics connected to the
relationships between Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods, by providing a
stimulating environment where researchers can discuss about opportunities and
challenges at the border of the two areas.

Important goals of the workshop are (i) to encourage the ongoing interaction
between the FM and AI communities, (ii) to identify innovative tools and
methodologies, and (iii) to elicit a discussion on open issues and new
challenges.

**** CONTRIBUTIONS FORMAT ****

We elicit the contribution of extended abstracts (4 pages + references)
discussing the interaction of Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods.
Invited talks will complement the presentations of contributed papers.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- automated reasoning
- automated planning and scheduling
- controller synthesis
- formal verification
- formal specification languages
- game theory
- hybrid and discrete systems
- logics
- reactive synthesis
- runtime verification and monitoring
- specification and verification of machine learning systems
- timed automata
- tools and applications

Contributed papers can present recent results at the border of the two fields,
new research directions, challenges and perspectives. Presentation of results
recently published in other scientific journals or conferences is welcome.

All papers will be included in the Proceedings of the event, published in the
CEUR Workshop Proceedings AI*IA Series as well as on the workshop website.
CEUR WS proceedings are archival proceedings indexed by DBLP and Scopus.

**** IMPORTANT DATES ****

– Paper submission (extended) : September 21st, 2019
– Notification: October 9th, 2019
– Camera-ready: November 1st, 2019
- Workshop: November 19-22, 2019

**** SUBMISSIONS ****

Submitted papers should not exceed four (4) pages, not including references.
Authors are asked to use the LaTeX style provided at
https://overlay.uniud.it/workshop/2019/.

Submissions must be in PDF format and will be handled via the
EasyChair Conference system at the following address:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=overlay19

**** INVITED SPEAKER ****

Speaker: Alessandro Abate (University of Oxford, UK)

Title: Certified Reinforcement Learning with Logic Guidance

Abstract: A model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is proposed,
to synthesise policies for an unknown, and possibly continuous-state, Markov
Decision Process (MDP), such that a given linear temporal property is satisfied.
We convert the given property into an automaton, namely a finite-state machine
expressing the property. Exploiting the structure of the automaton, we shape an
adaptive reward function on-the-fly, so that the RL algorithm can synthesise a
policy resulting in traces that probabilistically satisfy the linear temporal property.
Under the assumption that the MDP has finite number of states, theoretical
guarantees are provided on the convergence of the RL algorithm. Whenever the
MDP has a continuous state space, we empirically show that our framework finds
satisfying policies, if existing. Additionally, the proposed algorithm can handle
time-varying periodic environments.
The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated via a set of numerical
examples and benchmarks, where we observe an improvement of one order of
magnitude in the number of iterations required for the policy synthesis, compared
to existing approaches (when available).

Short Bio:Alessandro Abate is Professor of Verification and Control in the Department
of Computer Science at the University of Oxford (UK), and is a fellow of the Alan Turing
Institute in London (UK). He received a Laurea in Electrical Engineering in October 2002
from the University of Padova (IT), an MS in May 2004 and a PhD in December 2007,
both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, at UC Berkeley (USA). He has
been an International Fellow in the CS Lab at SRI International in Menlo Park (USA), and
a PostDoctoral Researcher at Stanford University (USA), in the Department of Aeronautics
and Astronautics. From June 2009 to mid 2013 he has been an Assistant Professor at
the Delft Centre for Systems and Control, TU Delft - Delft University of Technology (NL).

**** WORKSHOP CHAIRS ****

- Nicola Gigante • University of Udine, Italy
- Federico Mari • University of Rome Foro Italico, Italy
- AndreA Orlandini • ISTC-CNR, Italy

**** PROGRAM COMMITTEE (expanding...) ****

- Massimo Benerecetti • University of Naples Federico II
- Davide Bresolin • University of Padova
- Amedeo Cesta • ISTC-CNR, Rome
- Alessandro Cimatti • Fondazione Bruno Kessler
- Riccardo De Benedictis • ISTC-CNR, Rome
- Dario Della Monica • University of Udine
- Marco Faella • University of Naples Federico II
- Luca Geretti • University of Verona
- Salvatore La Torre • University of Salerno
- Ivan Lanese • University of Bologna
- Angelo Montanari • University of Udine
- Adriano Peron • University of Naples Federico II
- Carla Piazza • University of Udine
- Pietro Sala • University of Verona
- Guido Sciavicco • University of Ferrara
- Stefano Tonetta • Fondazione Bruno Kessler
- Enrico Tronci • University of Rome La Sapienza
- Alessandro Umbrico • ISTC-CNR, Rome
- Tiziano Villa • University of Verona

**** CONTACTS ****

Any inquiries can be directed to overlay@uniud.it