STARS 2026

Motivation and Topics

Static and runtime verification are extremely successful approaches to software correctness. On the one hand, static verification requires access to program code and guarantees the absence of bugs, but may produce false positives. On the other hand, runtime verification can work without program code access and can be tailored to only report real bugs, but cannot find latent bugs before execution.

These techniques can complement each other. For instance, runtime monitors can be deployed to observe parts of a system that cannot be statically verified, or to enforce properties for which static verification may be too restrictive. This interplay is especially relevant for heterogeneous systems where some components cannot be statically analysed. Some combinations of static and runtime verification are already widely studied (for instance, gradual typing), but the broader design space is rich and worth deeper exploration.

STARS 2026 welcomes the submission of talk proposals and papers on theoretical and practical approaches that combine static and runtime verification, including but not limited to:

• Program analysis and verification
• Monitor synthesis
• Gradual typing
• Instrumentation techniques
• System adaptation, including shields, gateways, and interceptors
• Correct-by-construction techniques such as controlled system synthesis and supervisory control
• Fault detection, isolation, recovery, and repair
• Correctness specification and specification mining
• Applications to security and the Internet of Things
• Surveys, retrospective studies, position papers, benchmarking studies, empirical evaluations, and tool papers related to the above

STARS 2026 is partially supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark project Hyben.

Invited Speakers

• Nobuko Yoshida - University of Oxford, UK
• Roland Kuhn - RKSW UG, Germany
• Davide Ancona - Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy

Submission of Talk Proposals and Full Papers

STARS plans to publish joint post-proceedings on Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) together with the other workshops at SEFM 2026 (to be confirmed). We are also planning a later journal special issue – quite likely, on Elsevier's Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming.

STARS welcomes two categories of submission:

• Talk proposals that, if accepted, will be presented at the workshop and later listed in the post-proceedings (but this will not constitute a formal publication). Talk proposal can be about new research, preliminary results, experience reports, as well as papers already published elsewhere.
• Full papers that, if accepted, will be presented at the workshop and later published in the post-proceedings. This category includes novel research results, tool papers, case studies, practical experience reports, etc. Full papers can be at most 15 pages long and must not have been already published, nor can they be concurrently submitted for publication elsewhere. To format your submission, you can use any single-column style broadly similar to LNCS; if accepted, the paper will later need to be formatted with the appropriate style for the planned post-proceedings.

Please submit your talk proposals or research papers here:

TBA – if you are planning a submission, please contact us (the organisers) so we will notify you when the submission will open.

The submission deadlines are (anywhere on Earth):

• 3 September 2026: abstracts for full papers
• 8 September 2026: full papers
• 15 September 2026: talk proposals

The author notifications will be on 7 October 2026.

Organisers

• Alceste Scalas - Technical University of Denmark (alcsc@dtu.dk)
• Adrian Francalanza - University of Malta (adrian.francalanza@um.edu.mt)

Programme Committee (WIP)

• Elli Anastasiadi - Aalborg University, Denmark
• Giorgio Audrito - Università di Torino, Italy
• Laura Bocchi - University of Kent, UK
• Raymond Hu - Queen Mary University of London, UK
• Roland Kuhn - RKSW UG, Germany
• Stefan Marr - Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Stefan K. Muller - University of Connecticut, USA
• Sung-Shik Jongmans - University of Groningen, Netherlands
• More PC members TBA