CPP (conference)

CPP (conference)
Name	CPP (conference)
Status	Active
Discipline	Computer security, programming languages
Frequency	Annual
Country	International
First	2011
Organizer	Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE

CPP (conference) is an annual academic conference focused on formal methods, program verification, and software correctness, bringing together researchers from computer science, software engineering, and mathematics. The meeting features peer-reviewed papers, tool demonstrations, tutorials, and invited talks that address proof assistants, static analysis, and formal semantics. CPP serves as a forum for cross-pollination among practitioners from universities, industry labs, standards bodies, and open-source projects.

Overview

CPP provides presentations and workshops that span topics such as automated theorem proving, model checking, type systems, program logics, and verification frameworks. Typical attendees include faculty from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers from Microsoft Research, engineers from Google, developers from Facebook, and contributors to projects like Coq, Isabelle, HOL4, Agda, and Lean. The program often references benchmarks and datasets curated by organizations such as SPEC, Standard ML of New Jersey, and collaborations with initiatives from DARPA, National Science Foundation, and European Research Council. Proceedings are usually archived by publishers like ACM, IEEE, and indexing services including DBLP and arXiv.

History

CPP originated from workshops and symposia that merged communities around interactive proof and automated reasoning, tracing roots to events such as CADE, FLoC, and workshops co-located with ICFP, PLDI, and POPL. Early influential contributions discussed mechanized proofs of compilers and operating systems, citing projects like CompCert, seL4, and proofs by teams at University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Oxford. Over time, CPP expanded to include artifacts from industry projects at IBM Research, Amazon Web Services, NXP Semiconductors, and collaborations with standards groups including ISO working groups and IEEE Standards Association panels.

Organization and Sponsors

CPP is organized by program committees drawn from universities and corporate research labs, with general chairs from institutions such as Princeton University, Stanford University, and ETH Zurich. Sponsorship frequently comes from academic societies and corporations—examples include Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Computer Society, Microsoft Research, Google Research, Amazon.com, Facebook AI Research, NVIDIA, and philanthropic funders like the Simons Foundation and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Local host institutions have included departments at University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, University of Cambridge, and EPFL.

Conference Program and Activities

The CPP program typically contains peer-reviewed paper sessions, invited keynote addresses, tool demonstrations, hands-on tutorials, panels, and artifact evaluation sessions. Demonstrations showcase systems such as Z3, SMT-LIB, SPARK, Frama-C, Viper, Dafny, and integration work with LLVM. Tutorials often feature maintainers of Coq, Isabelle, Lean, and topics overlapping with SAT competition, SMT competition, and reproducibility efforts tied to Artifact Evaluation committees. Panels have included representatives from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, LLNL, and standards stakeholders from W3C.

Accepted Works and Selection Process

Submissions undergo double-blind or single-blind peer review by a program committee composed of scholars from University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Technische Universität München, and industry researchers from Intel Corporation. The selection process emphasizes novelty and rigor, with artifact evaluation teams assessing reproducibility and tool availability via repositories hosted on platforms like GitHub and preprints on arXiv. Accepted papers often contribute proofs mechanized in systems such as Coq, Isabelle, ACL2, HOL Light, or consist of case studies involving Linux kernel verification, formalization of C11 (C language) memory model, or verified compilation pipelines referencing GCC and LLVM.

Notable Participants and Keynotes

CPP has hosted keynote speakers who are prominent in verification and programming languages, including scientists affiliated with Microsoft Research like researchers behind Z3 and Boogie, academics from Princeton University known for work on programming languages, and contributors to CompCert from INRIA. Other notable participants include fellows from Royal Society, awardees of the Turing Award, and leaders of major open-source formalization efforts such as contributors to Metamath, Mizar, and the Archive of Formal Proofs.

Impact and Reception

CPP has influenced the adoption of formal verification in industry and academia by promoting reproducible artifact evaluation, advancing tool interoperability, and fostering collaborations that produced verified software artifacts and standards. The conference’s proceedings and artifact tracks have been cited by works in Nature (journal), Communications of the ACM, and technical reports from NIST. CPP’s activities inform curriculum development at universities such as Harvard University and Yale University and influence procurement and assurance practices in organizations including NASA and European Space Agency. The reception among practitioner and academic communities highlights CPP’s role in bridging formal methods with real-world software engineering challenges.

Category:Academic conferences