-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Call for Presentations

12th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2025

Sunday 2 February 2025, Brussels, Belgium

www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/25/250202-fosdem.html

Organized in cooperation with Ada-Belgium and Ada-Europe

#AdaFOSDEM #AdaDevRoom #AdaProgramming #FOSDEM2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Ada FOSDEM community is pleased to announce the 12th edition of the Ada DevRoom! This edition will take place on Sunday morning 2nd of February in Belgium, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). This edition of the Ada DevRoom is once more organized in cooperation with Ada-Belgium [1] and Ada-Europe [2].

*** General Information about FOSDEM

FOSDEM [3], the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting, is a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event organized early each year in Brussels, Belgium. It is highly developer-oriented and brings together 8000+ participants from all over the world. No registration nor payment is necessary.

The goal is to provide open source developers and communities a place to meet with other developers and projects, to be informed about the latest developments in the open source world, to attend interesting talks and presentations on various topics by open source project leaders and committers, and to promote the development and the benefits of open source solutions.

*** Ada Programming Language and Technology

Ada is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for embedded and mission-critical software engineering, although nowadays it also supports object orientation, contracts and formal verification. It is used extensively in air traffic control, rail transportation, aerospace, nuclear, financial services, medical devices, etc. It is also perfectly suited for open source development with a fully open compiler (part of GCC), a formal verification system and a knowledgeable and vibrant community.

Awareness of safety and security issues in software systems is increasing. The NSA recently published [4] a list of programming languages that are recommended for the development of new software due to their memory safety and Ada was one of the list (one of the three compiled non-garbage collected languages!). In that context, it should be no surprise that NVIDIA has started using Ada/SPARK [5, 6] for their highest critical parts in their GPUs! The forums [7] have also seen an uptick of new users since the NSA announcement.

Multi-core platforms are now abundant and small, embedded devices are growing exponentially. These are some of the reasons that the Ada programming language and technology attracts more and more attention due to Ada.s support for programming by contract, performant and efficient code, high- and low-level abstractions and support for multi-core targets. The latest Ada language definition, Ada 2022, was approved by ISO as an international standard last year. Work on implementing the new features is ongoing, such as improved support for fine-grained parallelism, which were introduced in the new standard. The Ada-related technology, SPARK, provides a complete solution for the safety and security aspects stated above while being fully open source, making it stand out from other formal verification tools, as Ada/SPARK code is compiled directly into ready-to-run programs, which can even run on embedded systems.

More and more tools are available, many are open source, including for small and modern platforms. Interest in Ada keeps increasing, also in the open source community, from which many exciting projects have been started.

*** Ada Developer Room

FOSDEM is an ideal fit for an Ada Developer Room. On the one hand, it gives the general open source community an opportunity to see what is happening in the Ada community and how Ada can help produce reliable and efficient open source software. On the other hand, it gives open source Ada projects an opportunity to present themselves, get feedback and ideas, and attract participants to their project and collaboration between projects.

At previous FOSDEM events, the Ada-Belgium non-profit organization organized successful Ada Developer Rooms, offering a full day program in 2006 [8], a two-day program in 2009 [9], and full day programs in 2012-2016 [10-14], in 2018-2020 [15-17] and 2022 [18]. An important goal is to present exciting Ada technology and projects, including people outside the traditional Ada community. This edition is no different.

*** Call for Presentations

We would like to schedule technical presentations, tutorials, demos, live performances, project status reports, discussions, etc, in the Ada Developer Room.

Do you have a talk you want to give? Do you have a project you would like to present? Would you like to get more people involved with your project? Would you like to share some knowledge and lessons about Ada?

The Ada DevRoom organizers call on you to: - discuss and help organize the details, subscribe to the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list [19]; - for bonus points, be a speaker: the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list is the place to be! - don't hesitate to propose a topic that you would like to present to the community, we are eager to know what you have in store for us!

We're inviting proposals that are related to Ada software development, and include a technical oriented discussion. You're not limited to slide presentations, of course. Be creative. Propose something fun to share with people so they might feel some of your enthusiasm for Ada!

Speaking slots should be around 20 or 50 minutes, plus 5 or 10 minutes for Q&A. However, this schedule is flexible and we will adapt it to other formats. For example, a short technical talk can be transformed into a 10 minutes talk, plus time for Q&A. Depending on interest, we might also have a session with lightning presentations (e.g. 5 minutes each), and/or an informal discussion session.

Note that all talks will be streamed live and recorded (audio+video). By submitting a proposal, you agree to being recorded and streamed. You also agree that the contents of your talk will be published under the same license as all FOSDEM content, a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.

*** Submission Guidelines

Your proposal must be submitted to the FOSDEM Pretalx system [20]. If you already had an account from previous years, reuse it; if not, create a new account. If, for whatever reason, you cannot use Pretalx, you can also submit your proposal by messaging the Ada-FOSDEM mailing list [15]. If needed, feel free to contact us at the Ada-FOSDEM Mailing list or at <irvise (at) irvise.xyz> (without spaces).

Please, fill the information asked by the Pretalx system, which includes: - your name, affiliation, contact info; - the title of your talk (be descriptive and creative); - a short descriptive and attractive abstract; - preferred duration of your talk; - pointers to more information if applicable; - a short bio and photo.

See programs of previous Ada DevRooms (URLs below) for presentation examples, as well as for the kind of info we need.

Here is the slightly flexible schedule that we will follow: - November 30, 2024: end of the submission period. Remember, we only need the information in the list above. You do not have to submit the entire talk by this date. Try to submit your proposal as early as possible. It is better to submit half of the details early than be late, so do not wait for the last minute. - December 15, 2024: announcement of accepted talks. - January 15, 2025: your slides should be uploaded to the Pretalx platform. - February 2, 2025: Ada-DevRoom day!

We look forward to lots of feedback and proposals!

Regards,

The Ada-FOSDEM team Main organiser: Fernando Oleo Blanco <irvise (at) irvise.xyz> Second in command: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest (at) cs.kuleuven.be> Third in command: A.J. Ianozi <aj (at) ianozi.com>

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium [2] https://www.ada-europe.org [3] https://fosdem.org [4] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/3215760/nsa-r... [5] https://www.adacore.com/papers/nvidia-adoption-of-spark-new-era-in-security-... [6] https://blog.adacore.com/when-formal-verification-with-spark-is-the-stronges... [7] https://forum.ada-lang.io/ [8] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/06/060226-fosdem.html [9] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem.html [10] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/12/120204-fosdem.html [11] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/13/130203-fosdem.html [12] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/14/140201-fosdem.html [13] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/15/150131-fosdem.html [14] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/16/160130-fosdem.html [15] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/18/180203-fosdem.html [16] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/19/190202-fosdem.html [17] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/20/200201-fosdem.html [18] https://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/22/220206-fosdem.html [19] http://listserv.cc.kuleuven.be/archives/adafosdem.html [20] https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2025/cfp

-----------------------------------------------------------------------