The first Workshop of the Joint Research Center between Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute took place April 2-4, 2014, at the IMDEA Software building in Madrid. The workshop was aimed at reinforcing the collaboration between these two institutions on the following topics:

• Cryptography and Privacy
• Concurrency and Memory Models
• Programming Languages and Verification

The Workshop was the launch activity of the Center, at which researchers from both sides worked on topics of joint interest. It was organized by Judith Bishop and Georges Gonthier from Microsoft Research and by Gilles Barthe and Manuel Hermenegildo from the IMDEA Software Institute.

These workshops bring together researchers and students to discuss their collaborative work on hot topics in software in order to advance the state of the art and, where possible, to bring those advances to market. The focus of the first workshop is on verification (coordinated by Alexey Gotsman and Francesco Logozzo), programming languages (coordinated by Pierre-Yves Strub and Georges Gonthier), and security (coordinated by Juan Caballero and Ben Livshits).

The 3-day workshop included the following keynote speakers:

• Martín Abadi is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. He has been a Professor at UC Santa Cruz, where he is now Professor Emeritus, and also held the Chair Informatique et sciences numériques at the Collège de France. Earlier, he studied at Stanford University and worked at Digital’s System Research Center and other industrial labs. His research is mainly on computer and network security, programming languages, and specification and verification methods.

• Ben Livshits is a research scientist at Microsoft Research and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. He received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Math from Cornell University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, respectively. Ben’s research interests include application of analysis techniques to finding errors in programs, and, more generally, privacy, security, and performance of large programs.

• Alexey Gotsman is an Assistant Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute. Before joining IMDEA, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, where received his Ph.D. His research interests are in software verfication, particularly, in developing reasoning techniques and automated verification tools for real-world concurrent systems software.

More information can be found at the MSR-IMDEASW Joint Research Center web site and the Workshop site at Microsoft Research.