Artifact Evaluation for TACAS 2021

The deadline for artifact submission was moved to 2020-10-23.

As in 2020, TACAS'21 will include an artifact evaluation (AE) for all types of papers. There will be two rounds of the AE: For regular tool papers and tool demonstration papers, artifact evaluation is compulsory (see the TACAS’21 call for papers) and artifacts must be submitted to the first round; for research and case study papers, it is voluntary, and artifacts may be submitted to either the first or the second round. All accepted papers with accepted artifacts will receive a badge.

Artifacts and Evaluation Criteria

An artifact is any additional material (software, data sets, machine-checkable proofs, etc.) that substantiates the claims made in the paper and ideally makes them fully replicable. As an example, a typical artifact would consist of the tool (in binary or source code form) and its documentation, the input files (e.g., models analysed or programs verified) used for the tool evaluation in the paper, and a configuration file or document describing the parameters used in the experiments. The Artifact Evaluation Committee will read the corresponding paper and evaluate the submitted artifact w.r.t. the following criteria:

Compulsory AE for Tool and Tool Demonstration Papers

Regular tool papers and tool demonstration papers are required to be accompanied by an artifact for evaluation by the Artifact Evaluation Committee at paper submission time. The results of the evaluation will be taken into consideration in the paper reviewing and rebuttal phase of TACAS'21. The fact that not all experiments may be reproducible (e.g., due to high computational demands) does not mean automatic rejection of the paper. Papers that succeed in artifact evaluation and are accepted will receive a badge that can be shown on the title page of the corresponding paper.

Artifact Evaluation for Research and Case Study Papers

Authors of research papers and case study papers are also invited to submit an artifact. In this case, the submission is voluntary. If the artifact is submitted at the same time as the paper, then it will be reviewed immediately by the Artifact Evaluation Committee (AEC) and the results of the evaluation can be taken into consideration during the paper reviewing and rebuttal phase of TACAS’21. Authors of accepted papers who did not submit an artifact will be invited to submit an artifact after notification. Authors of artifacts that are accepted by the AEC will receive a badge that can be shown on the title page of the corresponding paper.

Artifact Submission

An artifact submission consists of

The artifact submission is handled via Easychair. Artifacts have to be submitted in the artifact evaluation track, with the same title and authors as the submitted paper.

Guidelines for Artifacts

We expect artifact submissions to package their artifact and write their instructions such that Artifact Evaluation Committee (AEC) members can evaluate the artifact using the TACAS’21 Artifact Evaluation Virtual Machine for VirtualBox available via Zenodo. The virtual machine is based on an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS GNU/Linux operating system with the following additional packages: build-essential, cmake, clang, mono-complete, openjdk-8-jdk, python3.8, pip3, ruby, and a 32-bit libc. Moreover, VirtualBox guest additions are installed on the VM; it is therefore possible to connect a shared folder from the host computer. The login and password of the default user are: “tacas21” / “tacas21”.

If the artifact requires additional software or libraries that are not part of the virtual machine, the instructions must include all necessary steps for their installation and setup. Any software that is not already part of the virtual machine must be included in the .zip file. AEC members will not download software or data from external sources, and the artifact must work without a network connection. In case you feel that this VM will not allow an adequate replication of the results in your paper, please contact the AEC chairs prior to artifact submission (also see below).

It is to the advantage of authors to prepare an artifact that is easy to evaluate by the AEC. Some guidelines:

Members of the AEC will use the submitted artifact for the sole purpose of artifact evaluation. We do, however, encourage authors to make their artifacts publicly and permanently available.

Possibility for exemption

In case your experiments cannot be replicated inside the provided VM, please contact the AEC chairs before submission. Possible reasons include the need for special hardware (GPUs, compute clusters, bluetooth devices, robots etc.), software licensing issues or the need to access the internet. In any case, you are encouraged to submit a complete artifact. This way, the reviewers have the option to replicate the experiments in the event they have access to the required resources.

Important Dates

All dates refer to 23:59 "anywhere on Earth" (UTC-12) on that day.

First round:
2020-10-15
2020-10-23 		Artifact submission deadline (mandatory for tool and tool demo papers, optional for research and case study papers)
2020-11-17 Communication with authors in case of technical problems with the artifact
2020-12-13 Notification of AE reviews (results will also be communicated to the TACAS paper reviewers and considered for the paper acceptance decision)
Second round:
2021-01-06 Artifact submission deadline (optional for accepted research and case study papers that did not submit to the first round)
2021-01-14 Communication with authors in case of technical problems with the artifact
2021-01-27 Notification of AE reviews
2021-01-28 Extended deadline for updating camera-ready paper with AEC badge (if artifact is accepted).
NB: regardless of whether an artifact was submitted, the camera-ready paper needs to be submitted by 2021-01-22.

Artifact Evaluation Chairs

Artifact Evaluation Committee