The second Workshop of the Joint Research Center between Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute took place April 9-10, 2015, at the IMDEA Software building in Madrid. The workshop was aimed at discussing collaborative work on chosen software projects and, where possible, to bring those advances to Microsoft’s businesses.

The workshop focused on the following three projects:

• Scalable and correct data management in the cloud
• Verification for cryptography and security
• Secure Distributed Programming

It was organized by Judith Bishop and Cedric Fournet from Microsoft Research and by Manuel Hermenegildo and Alexey Gotsman 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 2-day workshop included the following keynote speakers:

• Phil Bernstein is a distinguished scientist in the Database Group of Microsoft Research Redmond. Bernstein is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington and frequent committee member or chair of conferences such as VLDB and SIGMOD. He won the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 1994. Bernstein is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Currently, he is working on a distributed systems programming framework, called Project Orleans: Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability and Scalability.

• Aleks Nanevski is an Assistant Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute which he joined in the Fall 2009. Prior to that, Nanevski was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Prof. Edmund Clarke, at Harvard University under the supervision of Prof. Greg Morrisett, and at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. Aleksandar holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, which he obtained in August 2004. He is working on type systems and structured proofs for concurrent software verification.

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