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AdaCore’s Annual Make with Ada Competition is Starting

Over $8000 in cash and prizes for imaginative embedded systems projects in Ada or SPARK

NEW YORK, PARIS and SAN JOSE, Calif., October 16, 2018 - Today at Arm TechCon, Booth #1228, AdaCore announced the launch of its 3rd annual “Make with Ada” programming competition. Following on the success of its first two instances, this year’s competition calls on embedded developers across the globe to try their hand at building innovative embedded applications using the Ada and SPARK programming languages.

Submissions from previous years include inventive apps such as a Brushless DC Motorcontrol, a Swiss Army Smartwatch, an Autonomous Glider, a MIDI Synthesizer, an Ethernet Traffic Monitor, and an Autonomous Car Framework.

The contest runs from October 16, 2018,to February 15, 2019,and offers over $8000 in total prizes. Participants can register at www.makewithada.org.

Competition Rules

Any individual, or team of 4 individuals, aged 18 or above, can participate in the competition (business-supported people/projects are not eligible; this competition to geared towards enthusiasts and new Ada users).

The goal is to design and implement an embedded software project where Ada and/orSPARK are the primary language technologies. Entrants will need to demonstrate that their system meetsits requirements and uses sound software engineering practices.

Prizes and Judging Criteria

Projects will be judged based on project logs, and prizes will be awardedto those projects that best meet the overall criteria of software dependability, openness, collaborativeness, andinventiveness. Cash prizes include:

  • Top Prize:       $5000
  • Second Prize: $2000
  • Third Prize:     $1000

Also, a Student-only Prize (an Analog Discovery 2 Pro Bundle) will goto the best-ranking student finalist. Entrants must provide a student ID when registering to qualify for this prize, as defined in the competition terms and conditions http://makewithada.org/terms. A project submitted by a student is eligible for both the Student-only Prizeand the cash prizes.

Award winners will be announcedin March 2019.

Judges

The panel of judges for this year’s competition comprisesan international group of embedded systems experts, each with decades of experience in the software industry. They includeembedded systems experts Jack Ganssle, Principal Consultant at The Ganssle Group; Richard Nass, Embedded and IoT Franchises Brand Director at OpenSystems Media; Dr. Patrick Rogers, AdaCore Senior Technical Staff; and JonasAttertun, Embedded Software Engineer at Saab and our Make with Ada 2017 competition winner.

“The Make with Ada contest is a ton of fun! It’s a hard contest to judge as the range of submissions isincredibly innovative, and the entrants are so talented,” said two-time judge, Jack Ganssle. “Pros and hobbyist alike will discover that Ada/SPARK is easy to learn, and, once mastered, they may never go back to otherlanguages knowing their projects can get done faster and with fewer bugs.”

“This competition is all about developers learning just how easy it is to integrate Ada and SPARK technologies into a wide variety of applications,” said Fabien Chouteau, AdaCore software engineer and author of the Make with Ada blog post series. “Ada and SPARK are most known for their track record in large-scale long-lived systems, but you can use these languages and AdaCore’s tools for software that has to run in the most resource-limited embedded environments like the BBC micro:bit or RISC-V softcores on an FPGA.”

The Make with Ada competition is part of an overall AdaCore initiative to foster the growth of Ada and SPARK for developing embedded systems and more generally for developing “software that matters.” Other elements of this initiative are the free online training available at (learn.adacore.com), various resources for free software developers and students/hobbyists at the GitHub repository (github.com/AdaCore), and the GNAT Community (adacore.com/community).

Further information about Ada and SPARK, links to free resource pages, and instructions on how to get startedare available at http://makewithada.org/getting-started.

About Ada and SPARK

Ada is a modern, internationally standardized programming language with a long and successful track record in the development of high-reliability embedded systems. Its strong typing and compile-time checking help catch errors earlywhen they are easiestand least expensive to correct. The most recent version of the Ada standard, Ada 2012, supports contract-based programming (pre- and postconditions for subprograms), which in effect embeds the software’s low-level requirements as checkable assertions in the source code.

In critical systems where testing alone might not provide sufficient confidence, the SPARK subset of Ada supports mathematics-based assurance that relevant program properties are met(for example, the absence of run-time errors such as buffer overflow). SPARK can be introduced incrementally into a project, and contracts can be verified either statically (by the SPARK proof engine) or dynamically (with run-time checks).

About AdaCore

Founded in 1994, AdaCore supplies software development and verification tools for mission-critical, safety-critical, and security-critical systems. Four flagship products highlight the company’s offerings:

  • The GNAT Pro development environment for Ada, a complete toolset for designing, implementing, and managing applications that demand high reliability and maintainability,
  • The CodePeer advanced static analysis tool, an automatic Ada code reviewer and validator that can detect and eliminate errors both during development and retrospectively on existing software,
  • The SPARK Pro verification environment, a toolset based on formal methods and oriented towards high-assurance systems, and
  • The QGen model-based development tool, a qualifiable and customizable code generator and verifier for Simulink®and Stateflow®models, intended for safety-critical control systems.

Over the years customers have used AdaCore products to field and maintain a wide range of critical applications in domains such as railway systems, space systems, commercial avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, medical devices, and financial services.  AdaCore has an extensive and growing worldwidecustomer base; see www.adacore.com/customers/ for further information.

AdaCore products are open source and come with expert on-line support provided by the developersthemselves. The company has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris.www.adacore.com 

Press Contacts

Press Contacts
press-info@adacore.com
http://www.adacore.com
http://twitter.com/AdaCoreCompany

US:
Jessie Glockner
AdaCore Public Relations Representative
+1-646-532-2723

EU:
Emma Adby
AdaCore Marketing Operations Manager
+33 1 49 70 87 82