Programming language designers seek to provide strong tools to help developers reason about their programs. For example, the formal methods community seeks to enable developers to prove correctness properties of their code, and type system designers seek to exclude classes of undesirable behavior from programs. The security community creates tools to help developers achieve their security goals. In order to make these approaches as effective as possible for developers, recent work has integrated approaches from human-computer interaction research into programming language design. This workshop brings together programming languages, software engineering, security, and human-computer interaction researchers to investigate methods for making languages that provide stronger safety properties more effective for programmers and software engineers.

We have two goals: (1) to provide a venue for discussion and feedback on early-stage approaches that might enable people to be more effective at achieving stronger safety properties in their programs; (2) to facilitate discussion about relevant topics of participant interest.

HATRA is interested in two different kinds of contributions. First, extended abstracts that summarize an existing body of work that is relevant to the workshop’s topic; the presentations serve to familiarize the community, which may be diverse, with work that already exists. Second, research papers that describe a new idea, approach, or hypothesis in the space, and are presented as an opportunity for the authors to receive community feedback and for the community to seek inspiration from others.

The day will be divided into two segments. In the first segment, authors of accepted papers will present their work. In the second segment, we will conduct an “unconference”-style meeting. By allowing the participants to drive the agenda, we hope to focus on topics that provide stimulating and enlightening discussion.