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
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] The Ada-Belgium Organization
[2] https://www.ada-europe.org
[3] https://fosdem.org
[4] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/3215760/nsa-releases-guidance-on-how-to-protect-against-software-memory-safety-issues/
[5] NVIDIA: Adoption of SPARK Ushers in a New Era in… | AdaCore
[6] When Formal Verification with SPARK is the… | The AdaCore Blog
[7] https://forum.ada-lang.io/
[8] Ada at the Free and Open-Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2006)
[9] Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2009)
[10] Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2012)
[11] Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2013)
[12] Ada at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'2014)
[13] Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2015
[14] Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2016
[15] 8th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2018
[16] 9th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2019
[17] 10th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2020
[18] 11th Ada Developer Room at FOSDEM 2022
[19] http://listserv.cc.kuleuven.be/archives/adafosdem.html
[20] FOSDEM 2025 :: pretalx
