Formal methods

th FM 2009, the 16 International Symposium on Formal Methods, marked the 10th an- versary of the First World Congress on Formal Methods that was held in 1999 in Toulouse, France. We wished to celebrate this by advertising and organizing FM 2009 as the Second World Congress in the FM series, aiming to once again bring together the formal methods communities from all over the world. The statistics displayed in the table on the next page include the number of countries represented by the Programme Committee members, as well as of the authors of submitted and accepted papers. Novel this year was a special track on tools and industrial applications. Subm- sions of papers on these topics were especially encouraged, but not given any special treatment. (It was just as hard to get a special track paper accepted as any other paper.) What we did promote, however, was a discussion of how originality, contri- tion, and soundness should be judged for these papers. The following questions were used by our Programme Committee.