Preface to iFM&ABZ 2012

Preface to iFM&ABZ 2012 iFM 2012, the 9th International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods, and ABZ 2012, the Third International Conference on Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B, VDM, and Z, joined together in a single event, iFM&ABZ 2012, to celebrate Egon B¨orger's 65th birthday and his contribution to state-based formal methods. This co-location of iFM&ABZ 2012 was hosted by the Institute of Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione A. Faedo of the National Research Council (ISTICNR) of Italy and took place at the Area della Ricerca del CNR in Pisa during June 18-21, 2012. We would like to thank everyone in Pisa for making us feel very welcome during our time there. It was a pleasure to run an event to honor Egon. Professor Egon B¨orger was born in Bad Laer, Lower Saxony, Germany. Between 1965 and 1971 he studied at the Sorbonne, Paris (France), Universit´e Catholique de Louvain and Institut Sup´erieur de Philosophie de Louvain (in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), and the University of M¨unster (Germany). Since 1985 he has held a Chair in Computer Science at the University of Pisa, Italy. In September 2010 he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea. Throughout his work he has been a pioneer of applying logical methods in computer science. Particularly notable is his contribution as one of the founders of the Abstract State Machine (ASM) method. Egon B¨orger has been cofounder and Managing Director of the Abstract State Machines Research Center (see www.asmcenter.org). Building on his work on ASM, he was a cofounder of the series of international ASM workshops, which was part of this year's conference held under the ABZ banner. He contributed to the theoretical foundations of the method and initiated its industrial applications in a variety of fields, in particular programming languages, system architecture, requirements and software (re-)engineering, control systems, protocols, and Web services. In 2007, he received the Humboldt Research Award. He has been coauthor of several books and over 150 research papers, and organizer of over 30 international conferences, workshops, and schools in logic and computer science. As one can see, his influence has been broad as well as deep. It is an influence that one sees in all of the notations covered in the ABZ conference, as well as in the iFM event and the various integrations and combinations of formal methods seen there. Neither iFM nor ABZ have been here before, and it is thus especially fitting that we hold such an event in Pisa, where Egon has held a chair for many years.