Researchers of the IMDEA Software Institute have given several talks and have been panelists at the 37th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'21, the premier conference in the area of Logic Programming).

• Distinguished Professor Manuel Hermenegildo presented, as an invited panelist, his point of view on the integration of different programming paradigms, as exemplified by the Ciao/CiaoPP system developed at IMDEA Software. The panel, entitled “No Logic is an Island: Internal and External Integration of Logic Programming Paradigms” presented experiences and posed several questions and future challenges about how different subareas/subformalisms of Logic Programming can be integrated with each other, and with other paradigms.

• Recent PhD graduate Isabel García and PhD student Víctor Pérez presented a paper on their work with graduate student Miguel Ángel Sánchez and IMDEA Software’s faculty members José Francisco Morales, Pedro López, and Manuel Hermenegildo, entitled “VeriFly: On-the-fly Assertion Checking via Incrementality”. This work presents a tool for verifying or detecting errors interactively in software systems, early in the development cycle, without having to actually run the programs, in order to reduce production costs and increase software quality. Making use of the CiaoPP static analysis and verification framework, the VeriFly tool provides early, continuous, and precise assertion checking and other semantic feedback to programmers, presenting the results as colorings and tooltips directly on the program text within the integrated development environment (IDE). Experiments show that the modularity and incrementality of CiaoPP allow addressing a major challenge of such tools: responding interactively to program changes on the fly with very low latency times.

• Post-doctoral Researcher Bishoksan Kafle presented a paper on his work with Graeme Gange, Peter Schachte, Harald Sondergaard and Peter J. Stuckey entitled “Transformation-Enabled Precondition Inference”. This work presents a novel iterative method for solving the precondition inference problem, a non-trivial problem with important applications in program analysis and verification. The method automatically derives preconditions for the safety and unsafety of programs. The experimental evaluation shows that the method can infer precise preconditions (sometimes optimal) that are not possible using previous methods.

• Faculty members Manuel Carro (Director), Manuel Hermenegildo, and José Francisco Morales were members of the Program Committee. The first two also chaired Sessions.