Claudia Elena Chirita's Report

The European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS) is the primary European forum for academic and industrial researchers working on topics that are related to Software Science. The International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE) is one of the six main conferences that constitute the ETAPS event, and is concerned with the foundations on which software engineering is built.

Being offered the Royal Holloway Travel Award allowed me to travel to the Netherlands, and to participate in the 19th edition of FASE, which was held in Eindhoven between the 2nd and the 8th of April 2016. There I presented the paper 'Many-valued Institutions for Constraint Specification', which describes one of the first results of my postgraduate research in the theoretical, algebraic foundations of the Service-Oriented Computing paradigm.

Attending the conference has been, of course, a great experience of learning from leading researchers around the world about the newest developments in this research area. It has also been a great opportunity for me, as a young researcher, to give a talk on some of the results obtained in the first two years of my PhD and to discuss other preliminary ideas that could serve as a starting point for my future studies. One of the main topics of FASE is precisely the fundamental approach to specification, design, and implementation of particular classes of systems, such as adaptive, collaborative, embedded, distributed, and service-oriented. It is thus no surprise that the feedback that I have received at the conference from the scientific community proved to be not only essential for further developing the main underlying ideas of my study, but also useful for preparing a journal version of the submitted paper and for the overall development of my thesis.

The mathematical tools and techniques used in the paper that I have presented are closely related to those employed in other recently explored research areas, such as that of algebraic models for computational creativity. Attending the conference has provided me the chance not only to meet and learn about the current research of well-known members of the community of fundamental approaches to software engineering, but also to interact with some members of the computational-creativity community. This raised the problem of finding out how the proposed framework for dealing with service-oriented applications could also be used in the study of other types of complex systems, from networks of concurrent processes to algebraic models of free-jazz performances. Currently I am working on further developing this topic as a main concrete example of the general abstract framework presented at FASE.

Last but not least, at the conference I had the chance of meeting Professor Fernando Orejas from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, the co-author of the paper that I presented. The meeting has lead to several technical discussions, and also to the possibility of extending our research collaboration.