The symposium "Languages: From Formal to Natural," celebrating the 65th birthday of Nissim Francez, was held on May 24-25, 2009 at the Technion, Haifa. The symposium consisted of two parts, a veri?cation day and a language day, and covered all areas of Nissim's past and present research interests, areas which he has inspiringly in?uenced and to which he has contributed so much. This volume comprises severalpapers presentedat the symposium, as wellas additional articles that were contributed by Nissim's friends and colleagues who were unable to attend the event. We thank the authors for their contributions. Wearealsogratefultothereviewersfor their dedicated and timely work. Nissim Francez was born on January 19, 1944. In 1962 he started his mat- matical education at the Hebrew University. He received a BSc in Mathematics in 1965, and, after four years of military service, started his MSc studies in Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Amir Pnueli. After completing the MSc program in 1971, Nissim continued his studies toward a PhD, again, at the Weizmann Institute of Science and, again, under the supervisionof Amir Pnueli. Nissim wasawardeda PhDin Computer Science in 1976.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2007, held in Braga, Portugal. Coverage includes software verification, probabilistic model checking and markov chains, automata-based model checking, security, software and hardware verification, decision procedures and theorem provers, as well as infinite-state systems.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV '97, held in Haifa, Israel, in June 1997.
The volume presents 34 revised full papers selected from a total of 84 submissions. Also included are 7 invited contributions as well as 12 tool descriptions. The volume is dedicated to the theory and practice of computer aided formal methods for software and hardware verification, with an emphasis on verification tools and algorithms and the techniques needed for their implementation. The book is a unique record documenting the recent progress in the area.

Model checking technology is among the foremost applications of logic to computer science and computer engineering. The model checking community has achieved many breakthroughs, bridging the gap between theoretical computer science and hardware and software engineering, and it is reaching out to new challenging areas such as system biology and hybrid systems. Model checking is extensively used in the hardware industry and has also been applied to the verification of many types of software. Model checking has been introduced into computer science and electrical engineering curricula at universities worldwide and has become a universal tool for the analysis of systems.

This Festschrift volume, published in celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Model Checking, includes a collection of 11 invited papers based on talks at the symposium "25 Years of Model Checking," 25MC, which was part of the 18th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2006), which in turn was part of the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2006) held in Seattle, WA, USA, in August 2006.

Model checking is currently attracting considerable attention beyond the core technical community, and the ACM Turing Award 2007 was given in recognition of the paradigm-shifting work on this topic initiated a quarter century ago. Here we honor that achievement with the inclusion of facsimile reprints of the visionary papers on model checking by Edmund Clarke and Allen Emerson, and by Jean-Pierre Queille and Joseph Sifakis.

An expanded and updated edition of a comprehensive presentation of the theory and practice of model checking, a technology that automates the analysis of complex systems. Model checking is a verification technology that provides an algorithmic means of determining whether an abstract model-representing, for example, a hardware or software design-satisfies a formal specification expressed as a temporal logic formula. If the specification is not satisfied, the method identifies a counterexample execution that shows the source of the problem. Today, many major hardware and software companies use model checking in practice, for verification of VLSI circuits, communication protocols, software device drivers, real-time embedded systems, and security algorithms. This book offers a comprehensive presentation of the theory and practice of model checking, covering the foundations of the key algorithms in depth. The field of model checking has grown dramatically since the publication of the first edition in 1999, and this second edition reflects the advances in the field. Reorganized, expanded, and updated, the new edition retains the focus on the foundations of temporal logic model while offering new chapters that cover topics that did not exist in 1999: propositional satisfiability, SAT-based model checking, counterexample-guided abstraction refinement, and software model checking. The book serves as an introduction to the field suitable for classroom use and as an essential guide for researchers.