EXPRESS 2026 — Explainable and Reliable Software Systems
2nd Workshop, co-located with SPLASH/ISSTA 2026
Table of Contents
Overview
EXPRESS 2026 is the 2nd Workshop on Explainable and Reliable Software Systems, co-located with SPLASH/ISSTA 2026 in Oakland. Scope, in one line: dependability, safety, and reliability of software and agentic systems — verification, trustworthy AI, interpretability of ML models, and runtime observability all in-scope.
Sibling to SpecOps 2026 on the same week: SpecOps is about synthesizing and validating specs with foundation models; EXPRESS is about explaining and observing the resulting systems at runtime. The two workshops cover adjacent halves of the same problem — spec-driven build then explainable operate.
Logistics
- When: October 3-9, 2026 (span covers workshop days across SPLASH/ISSTA week)
- Where: Oakland, CA (venue not listed on workshop page; see parent event)
- Co-located with: SPLASH/ISSTA 2026
- Site: conf.researchr.org/home/splash-issta-2026/express-2026
CFP timeline
- Submission deadline: Sun Jun 28, 2026 AoE (closed)
- Author notification: Fri Jul 31, 2026 (T+15 relative to this note)
- Camera-ready: not listed
- Workshop: Oct 3-9, 2026
Accepted-paper list and invited speakers: not yet on the page.
Organizers (PC Chairs)
- Puzhuo Liu — Ant Group & Tsinghua University
- Pinjia He — Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
- Hongyu Zhang — Chongqing University
- Yuhong Nan — Sun Yat-sen University
Adjacencies to current work
- Reliability + agentic systems is one of the site's active threads (see also the ISSRE / QRS / DSC tracking discussion). EXPRESS explicitly names "agentic systems" in scope — closest workshop-scale fit for that thread.
- Overlaps with the observability and runtime evidence research lines: runtime observability is in-scope.
- Complementary to SpecOps (spec synthesis + validation) — attend/watch both if the schedule allows.
TODO
[ ]Refresh once accepted-paper list drops (~early August 2026, after Jul 31 notification).[ ]Confirm exact workshop day within the Oct 3-9 window once program lands.[ ]Cross-link to parent SPLASH/ISSTA 2026 index once program is finalized.[ ]Watch for video/slides release; capture into the reliability + agents research index.