Opening Remarks by Vijay Ganesh

In the last 15 years, starting the mid 1990s to today, SAT/SMT solvers  have seen an amazing improvement in efficiency and expressive power. The result has essentially been a dramatic rise in the use of SAT/SMT solvers in many areas of software engineering research such as formal methods, synthesis, program analysis and testing. It is safe to say that SAT/SMT solving is a disruptive technology. Irrespective of one's strategic frame of thought in the context of software reliability research, SAT/SMT solvers are an indispensable tactic.

This summer school aims at unpacking the collective knowledge on SAT/SMT solvers, their applications, and theoretical foundations for researchers as diverse as professors and graduate students in software engineering to hackers.The aims of the summer school include:

1. To be a marketplace of ideas for SAT/SMT solver developers and power users
2. Connect new power users with established users and solver developers
3. Connect complexity theorists with practitioners
4. Connect researchers in non-CDCL approaches (e.g., Physics inspired) with researchers in CDCL-based approaches to SAT
5. Encourage discussion on solvers for multicores, solver-based programming languages and empirical complexity