29 May - 4 June 2017, 1st School on Foundations of Programming and Software Systems, Braga, Portugal

It is our greatest pleasure to announce the first edition of the School on Foundations of Programming and Software systems. The school is jointly funded by EATCS, ETAPS, ACM SIGLOG, and ACM SIGPLAN. The topic of the first edition is Probabilistic programming. It will take place in Braga, Portugal, May 29th - June 4th 2017.

Probabilistic programming languages are used for modelling and analysis purposes across multiple areas of computer science, including machine learning, security, and quantitative biology. In particular, they provide a rigorous foundation for machine learning where they are used to describe probabilistic models and to perform inference in presence of uncertain information. Probabilistic programs are also used in cryptography and in privacy for modelling and quantifying security. The goal of the school is to introduce attendants to theoretical and practical aspects of programming languages, and will propose courses that cover the following topics: semantics, analysis, verification, applications to machine learning, privacy, and security. The school will have lectures by Andy Gordon, Catuscia Palamidessi, Christel Baier, Dexter Kozen, Frank Wood, Hongseok Yang, Javier Esparza, Michael Carbin, Peter Selinger, Prakash Panangaden, Sriram Sankaranarayanan, and Vitaly Shmatikov.