Welcome to ACM SIGAda's 1999 Annual International Conference  --  the yearly "meeting place" of the Ada community!  We offer you a conference featuring a top-quality technical program focused on important strengths of Ada: distributed, real-time, and embedded systems. The visions of these systems reflected in Ada's original requirements in the 1970's have expanded in almost unimagineable ways with continuing breakthroughs in the hardware arena, coupled with steady advances in network, communications and other technologies.  As software challenges remain dominant in these domains with rapid hardware advances, Ada's track record of reliability, efficiency, robustness and all-around success is unparalleled at solving these real-time and/or distributed system challenges.  High-speed ground transportation systems all over the world, most modern jetliner avionics, satellite systems, and battle automation are now deployed in Ada and powering important parts of the world's economies and defenses.  Two days of technical papers, keynotes, and invited presentations will report how these successes are achieved and where remaining issues are leading.

To complement technical papers and keynote talks focused on these themes, parallel-track sessions on other important Ada software engineering and education topics are also offered at SIGAda '99.  Yet, with few exceptions, these topics directly or indirectly interact with theme topics.  Thus, we hope you will find the entire technical program enticing whether or not you are currently working in distributed and/or real-time embedded domains.

Beyond the formal conference of selected papers and presentations, SIGAda '99 offers workshops and tutorials with the same duality of on-theme and complementary topics.  SIGAda's workshops provide full- or half-days for those working the same issues to share with each other and leverage everyone's accomplishments; workshop products are "delivered" to the community.  The broad offerings of career-enhancing tutorials include basic Ada 95 introductions for software engineers new to Ada, intermediate and advanced Ada topics for practitioners striving to expand their Ada expertise, and several language-independent technology topics which are nevertheless often coupled with Ada technology because they mutually support the disciplined development and evolution of serious, high quality software systems.

Finally, we hope SIGAda '99 provides you an outstanding opportunity for rewarding affiliation with colleagues in industry and academia  -- discussions "in the hall," informal meal-time meetings, and even during the more relaxed moments we make for socializing and at the nearby Redondo Beach and Pier attractions.   If you don't realize it already, you will learn that these associations can be as valuable as the technical program at professional conferences, and often extend the experience after you return home.

We take this opportunity to thank our early Corporate Sponsors, TRW, Green Hills, Ada Core Technologies, and Aonix,  for their generous support for SIGAda '99.
 
 

General Chair
Hal Hart
TRW
Hal.Hart@ACM.Org

Program Co-Chair
Tucker Taft
AverStar
stt@averstar.com

Program Co-Chair
Franco Gasperoni
Ada Core Technologies & ACT-Europe
gasperon@gnat.com