What to read after VMCAI 2004?

This volume contains the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Veri'cation, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2004), held inVenice, January11-13,2004, inconjunctionwithPOPL2004, the31stAnnual SymposiumonPrinciplesofProgrammingLanguages, January14-16,2004.The purposeofVMCAIistoprovideaforumforresearchersfromthreecommunities- veri'cation, model checking, and abstract interpretation-which will facilitate interaction, cross-fertilization, and the advance of hybrid methods that combine thethreeareas.Withthegrowingneedforformaltoolstoreasonaboutcomplex, in'nite-state, and embedded systems, such hybrid methods are bound to be of great importance. Topics covered by VMCAI include program veri'cation, static analysis te- niques, model checking, program certi'cation, type systems, abstract domains, debugging techniques, compiler optimization, embedded systems, and formal analysis of security protocols. This year's meeting follows the four previous events in Port Je'erson (1997), Pisa (1998), Venice (2002), LNCS 2294 and New York (2003), LNCS 2575. In particular, we thank VMCAI 2003's sponsor, the Courant Institute at New York University, for allowing us to apply a monetary surplus from the 2003 meeting to this one. The program committee selected 22 papers out of 68 on the basis of three - views.Theprincipalcriteriawererelevanceandquality.TheprogramofVMCAI 2004 included, in addition to the research papers, - a keynote speech by David Harel (Weizmann Institute, Israel) onAGrand Challenge for Computing: Full Reactive Modeling of a Multicellular Animal, - aninvitedtalkbyDawsonEngler(StanfordUniversity, USA)onStaticAn- ysis Versus Software Model Checking for Bug Finding, - an invited talk by Mooly Sagiv (Tel Aviv University, Israel) called On the Expressive Power of Canonical Abstraction, and -atutorialbyJoshuaD.Guttman(Mitre, USA)on Security, Protocols, and Trust. We would like to thank the Program Committee members and the reviewers, without whose dedicated e'ort the conference would not have been possible.