1st Romanian-Japanese Algebraic Specification Meeting


Summary


Goals
The goals of this meeting were (in no particular order)

These goals were actually met very succesfully, even better than expected before. A friendship relationship has been established between the participants at RJ'97, which together with the professional relationship constitutes a solid platform for long term partnership and collaboration between the two groups. The CafeOBJ project was discussed in detail and neatly presented to the Romanian side. Also the CafeOBJ project got substantilal feedback in the area of semantics, design, examples, and main documents. Finally, the Japanese friends were able to get a taste of Romanian food and wines, of the style of Romanian people and its Latin character (open and sometimes very expansive...), of its natural beauties (such as the Carpathians mountains and its rather fancy resorts and places), its old and not so old castles, its medieval cities and forttresses, etc.


Participation,Venue, and Workshop Organisation
The participation to RJ'97 was established to a close circle of people representing the top scientists of the algebraic specification community in Romania and Japan (the later representing the core of the CafeOBJ project). The organiser, Razvan Diaconescu, belongs in some sense to both sides, since he has been spending most of the last 19 month in Japan working for CafeOBJ. He was greatly helped in organising the workshop by Professor Cazanescu.

From the very beginning RJ'97 was planned to have a flexible schedule combining technical work with sightseeing and relaxation in the mountain park surrounding the site of the workshop. For example, there was no pre-established schedule (we had just a collection of tentative talks and an intention for discussing some important issues, such as the basic documents of CafeOBJ). The concrete schedule was determined on the spot,and there was no time limitation for talks. This unique workshop style was largely possible due to the reduced number of participants, most of them with already close relationship between them. Altough there was a sense of time flowing too quickly, this style proved to be very productive and all participants greatly appreciated it.

The venue of RJ'97 was in the famous mountain resort of Sinaia (nicknamed the "Pearl of the Carpathians" ) about 110km NW from Otopeni International Airport and 125km from the capital city of Bucharest. We all lived in "Vila Cavalerilor", an 120 old fancy vila (with modern facitlities but classically arranged and furnished) on the domain of the world famous Peles Castle. The workshop meetings were held in one of the living rooms of Vila Cavalerilor, and the meals (Romanian-style food) were served at the Economat Restaurant (5 minutes walk from Vila Cavalerilor).

The participants at RJ'97 came from several places in Romania and Japan, such as the University of Bucharest, the University of Iasi, the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy (IMAR), Japan Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (JAIST), and Software Research Associates Inc., Tokyo (SRA). They were (in alphabetic order):


Technical Contents
The RJ'97 presentations were as follows:

  • Overview of the Cafe language and environment, in which Kokichi Futatsugi gave a detailed presentation of the current stage of the Cafe project,


  • The CafeOBJ definition, in which Razvan Diaconescu presented the principles and the current design of the CafeOBJ algebraic language also discussing some semantic issues undelrying this design,


  • The network-based proof system of Cafe, in which Ataru Nakagawa presented the principles and design of the Forsdonnet system supporting distributed specification writing and verification in Cafe over internet,


  • Implementation of Order-sorted rewriting in CafeOBJ, in which Toshimi Sawada presented the architecture of the CafeOBJ implementation at SRA,


  • Compiler construction for CafeOBJ, in which Makoto Ishisone presented the architecture of the CafeOBJ compiler,


  • Proof technologies for CafeOBJ, in which Dorel Lucanu presented new method for coinduction-based simulation and refinement proofs in CafeOBJ, and several examples featuring several of the new paradigms implemented by CafeOBJ.


  • Process Algebra and CafeOBJ, in which Gheorghe Stefanescu presented some of the current issues in specification verification with process algebra vs. CafeOBJ specification/verification technologies.



  • Besides presentations Razvan Diaconescu lead a technical discussion on the CafeOBJ Report and Ataru Nakagawa on the CafeOBJ Manual in which they collected useful feedback for the main CafeOBJ documents.

    The presentations and organised discussions were accompanied by informal discussions on various topics ranging from concrete CafeOBJ design and implementation issues to pure semantic or educational issues. Toshimi Sawada even applied several corrections to the CafeOBJ implementation on the spot, and several examples were actually run on the spot too.


    Detailed Schedule
    RJ'97 was held between 24th and 28th of August 1997. This is the detailed schedule:


    Thanks from the organiser
    The organiser wishes to thank

  • to all participants for ther contribution to the excelent athmosphere of RJ'97, and especially to the Japanese friends for their genuine interest in Romania (the organiser will always remember the wisdom of Kokichi Futatsugi, the charm and unique talents of Ataru Nakagawa, the kindness of Toshimi Sawada, and the friendliness of Makoto Ishisone),
  • to Prof Cazanescu, for his crucial help with organising RJ'97, and for his very special expertise with traditional Romanian food and with Romanian wines,
  • to the Presidency of Romania (presidential advisor Zoe Petre) and to Mr. Marius Dumitru, general manager of "Administratia Patrimoniului Protocolului de Stat", for supporting with the venue,
  • to Mr. Gheorghe Musat, general manager of the Economat Complex, and his administrator Mr. Sandu for carefully observing the needs of RJ'97 at the venue,
  • to Bianca, the charming guide of Bran Castle, and
  • to the anonymous guides of Peles and Pelisor Castles.
  • All of them contributed greatly to the success of RJ'97!


    Razvan Diaconescu
    31 August 1997