State Machines: An Overview of the Project Yuri Gurevich Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052 November 2003 This is an extended abstract of an invited talk at the Third International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems (to be) held in Vienna, Austria, in February 2004. We quickly survey the ASM project, from its foundational roots to industrial applications. 0 Prelude The ASM project started as a foundational investigation by this theorist in the mid 1980s at the University of Michigan. In the 1990s, a community of ASM-ers formed, see the ASM academic website [1], and several engines to d execute abstract state machines were developed. Siemens was the first large company to use such engines. In 1998, Microsoft Research invited this theorist to build a group on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) and to apply the ASM theory. We sketch these developments stressing the foundational issues. A draft of the talk, in the form of Power-Poin...