CAV 2014 LNCS PROCEEDINGS: EDITOR'S PREFACE

This volume contains the papers presented at CAV 2014: International Conference on Computer Aided Verification held on July 17-21, 2014 in Vienna, Austria.
CAV 2014 was the 26th in a series dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of computer-aided formal analysis methods for hardware and software systems.
As part of the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) and the Vienna Summer of Logic, CAV 2014 was collocated with many other conferences in logic. CAV considers it vital to continue spurring advances in hardware and software verification while expanding to new domains such as biological systems and computer security.
The conference covered the spectrum from theoretical results to concrete applications, with an emphasis on practical verification tools and the algorithms and techniques that are needed for their implementation. The proceedings of the conference will have been the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. A selection of papers was invited to a special issue of Formal Methods in System Design and the Journal of the ACM.
There were 229 paper submissions, 175 regular papers and 54 short papers.  Each submission was reviewed by at least 3, and on the average 4.0, program committee members.  The program committee decided to accept 57 papers which is an acceptance rate of 25%, consisting of 46 regular papers (26%) and 11 short papers (20%).
There were 293 abstract submissions originally and a couple of papers, not included in the number of 229 papers above, immediately rejected due to excessively exceeding the page limit.  Among the 172 rejected papers considered for computing the acceptance rate, there were 7 regular and 1 short paper withdrawn on behalf of the authors after first versions of reviews had been sent out during the rebuttal phase.
Regarding paper format, CAV 2014 saw some important changes compared to previous versions.  Beside long papers, e.g., regular papers, there were also short papers, but short papers were not restricted to be tool papers anymore.  It was also encouraged to submit high quality tool papers and empirical evaluations as long papers.  These regular papers with mostly only empirical  results, and not necessarily new theory, produced some reservations on the side of the reviewers and was an import topic during the discussion of the program committee.  Further, references did not count towards the page limit.
Beside the presentations of the accepted papers, and shared FLoC sessions, the program of CAV 2014 featured two tutorials, two CAV invited talks, three competition presentations and last but not least the presentation of the CAV award.
The first tutorial was given by David Monniaux, Verimag, Grenoble, France, on "How do we get inductive invariants?" and the second tutorial by Fabio Somenzi, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, on "Hardware Model Checking".
The first invited talk by Erik Winfree, Caltech, Pasadena, California, USA, had "Designing and verifying molecular circuits and systems made of DNA" as title.  The second invited talk by Rance Cleaveland, University of Maryland and Fraunhofer, USA, discussed "Automated Testing".
The CAV 2014 affiliated competitions consisted of the first "Syntax-Guided Synthesis Competition", organized by Rajeev Alur, Dana Fisman, Rishabh Singh and Armando Solar-Lezama.  Then there was the presentation of the results of the first Synthesis Competition for Reactive Systems "SYNTCOMP'' organized by Swen Jacobs, Roderick Bloem, Rüdiger Ehlers and the 7th incarnation of the "Hardware Model Checking Competition", which was organized by Armin Biere and Keijo Heljanko.
The CAV award was presented by the CAV award committee, which consisted of Moshe Vardi, Ahmed Bouajjani, Tom Ball, and headed by Marta Kwiatkowska.
The FLoC 2014 Interconference Topics on Security and SAT/SMT/QBF are a FLoC 2014 initiative by CAV, CSF, and IJCAR to foster exchange and discussion between conferences. The Interconference Topics consist of sessions from the participating conferences with a joint thematic focus.  They provide a special opportunity for FLoC participants with particular interest in these topics.
We would like to thank our Workshop and Competition Chair Martina Seidl, for caring about 21 CAV workshops, including 4 workshops affiliated with other FLoC conferences too.  As Publication Chair Swen Jakobs did an excellent job setting up the web-pages and producing the proceedings.
Of course without the tremendous effort put in the reviewing process by our program committee members this conference would not have been possible.  We would further thank the steering committee for support and guidance during the whole conference process as well as Andrei Voronkov for providing the EasyChair service in general and excellent support during using EasyChair for CAV 2014.