September 7, 2005
The Story of Moose: a Language Independent Reengineering Environment
Abstract:
MOOSE is a language-independent environment for reverse engineering and reengineering complex software systems. MOOSE provides the infrastructure for a wide range of tools for analyzing and manipulating software models. We describe how MOOSE has evolved over the years, we draw a number of lessons learned from our experience, and we outline the present and future of MOOSE.
BIO:
Oscar Nierstrasz is a Professor of Computer Science at the Institute
of Computer Science (IAM) of the University of Bern since 1994, where
he leads the Software Composition Group. Prof. Nierstrasz is the author
of over a hundred publications and co-author of the book Object-Oriented
Reengineering Patterns (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003).
The Software Composition Group carries out research in diverse aspects
of how to make systems more flexible with respect to changing requirements.
Current research is focussed on (i) programming languages and mechanisms
to support the flexible composition of high-level, component-based abstractions,
and (ii) tools and environments to support the understanding, analysis
and transformation of software systems to more flexible, component-based
designs.
Prof. Nierstrasz has been active in the international object-oriented
research community, serving on the programme committees of the ECOOP,
OOPSLA, ESEC and many other conferences, and as the Programme Chair of
ECOOP '93 and ESEC '99. He is president of CHOOSE, the subgroup on object-oriented
systems and environments of the Swiss Informatics Society.
He completed his B.Math at the University of Waterloo in 1979 and his
M.Sc. in 1981 and his Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of Toronto, in the
area of Office Information Systems. Since then he has worked at the Institute
of Computer Science in Crete (1985), and in the Object Systems Group at
the Centre Universitaire d'Informatique of the University of Geneva, Switzerland
(1985-1994).
September 8, 2005
Innovations in pervasive computing
Abstract:
Two innovative applications of pervasive computing are presented: Undercover,
a persistent world location based multi-player mobile game; and L-INK,
a ubiquitous computing application based on photo-chemical principles.
The processes associated with their invention and software development
are discussed in detail.
Innovation is invention translated into products that the consumer is
willing to pay. The management of this translation for Undercover and
L-INK, two pioneer applications of pervasive computing, is paradigmatic
of the challenges facing a spin-off from university research The log of
the events that went from early brainstorms to products available in the
market is presented for illustrative purposes.
BIO:
António Câmara is CEO of YDreams
and Professor at the New University of Lisbon. He has a PhD from Virginia
Tech and was a Post-Doc at MIT. António Câmara has been a
Visiting Professor at Cornell University and MIT.
He is the author of Environmental Systems, A Multidimensional Approach
published by Oxford University Press (http://gasa.dcea.fct.unl.pt/camara),
and more than seventy refereed papers. He advised twenty five PhD students
and thirty five MSc students.. António Câmara was Senior
Adviser of the National Geographic Information System project (the first
spatial data infrastructure available in the Internet) and Senior Consultant
of Expo98 (the World Fair held in Lisbon). In June 2000, he co-founded
YDreams, one of the most innovative mobile software companies in the world
with work featured on the New York Times, Business Week, El Pais, Liberation,
Guardian, and Wired among other media outlets.
September 9, 2005
(2005 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award recipients)
Engineering Distributed Software: a Structural Discipline
Abstract:
The role of structure in specifying, designing, analysing, constructing and evolving software is a central theme of our research in Distributed Software Engineering. Separation of structural concerns has its origins in the seminal 1975 paper by deRemer and Kron which made the distinction between programming-in-the-large and programming-in-the-small and advocated the need for a separate module interconnection language. The structural view, we advocate, puts structure at the heart of software architecture. Structure, as a separable perspective, relies on sound techniques for composition - whether of software components or specifications of behaviour. These complementary concerns of structure and composition are the themes we address here.
With hindsight, our work can be roughly divided into three overlapping phases. In the 1980's, explicit structure characterised our work on configuration programming. The prototype distributed system CONIC included the ability to specify, construct and dynamically evolve a distributed software system, using a configuration language to compose software components. Work on the general purpose ADL Darwin and its industrial instantiation, Koala, followed. The second phase, in the 1990s, focused on modelling in a structural framework. The aim was to analyse systems as structural compositions of their components' behaviour. This led to our work with labelled transition systems (LTS), the process algebra, FSP (Finite State Processes) and construction of the model checker, LTSA. Model animation and model synthesis from scenarios has enriched this vein of research. Our current work, in the 2000s, is concerned with implicit structural specifications. The aim is to generate and check structures which satisfy constraints that can be imposed both statically and dynamically. We believe that this is needed in realising self-organising systems which both automatically configure themselves and subsequently reconfigure themselves to accommodate dynamically changing context and requirements without human intervention.
The structural discipline dictates formalisms and techniques that are
compositional, components that are context independent and systems that
can be constructed and evolved incrementally. The talk overviews our experience
with, and gives indications of our future work in, using structure to
engineer distributed software. We emphasise the role of software tools
and prototype systems in doing Software Engineering research.
BIO:
Professor Jeff Kramer is Head of Distributed Software Engineering in the Department of Computing at Imperial College. He was Head of Department from 1999 to 2004. He was a principal investigator in the various research projects which led to the development of the CONIC environment for configuration programming and the Darwin architectural description language which is used in commercialised form by Philips for the software for high end television sets. His current research work is on behaviour analysis,the use of models in requirements elaboration and architectural approaches to self-organising software systems. Jeff Kramer is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the IEE and Fellow of the ACM. He was program co-chair of the 21st ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering) in Los Angeles in 1999, Chair of the Steering Committee for ICSE from 2000 to 2002, associate editor and member of the editorial board of ACM TOSEM from 1995 to 2001 and is currently associate editor and member of the editorial board of IEEE TSE. He was winner of the Most Influential Paper Award at ICSE 2003. He is co-author of a recent book on Concurrency, co-author of a previous book on Distributed Systems and Computer Networks, and the author of over 150 journal and conference publications.
Prof. Jeff Magee is Head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. His research is primarily concerned with the software engineering of distributed systems, including design methods, analysis techniques, operating systems, languages and program support environments for these systems. His work on Software Architecture has lead to the commercial use by Phillips of the Architecture Description language Darwin in their next generation of consumer television products. He is the author of over 80 refereed conference and journal publications and has written a book on concurrent programming entitled "Concurrency - State models and Java programs". He was co-editor of the IEE Proceedings on Software Engineering and is currently chair of the International Conference on Software Engineering Steering Committee. He is a Chartered Engineer and a member-at-large of the ACM SIGSOFT committee. He was awarded the BCS 1999 Brendan Murphy prize for the best paper in Distributed systems and the IEE Informatics Premium prize for 1998/99 for a paper on Software Architecture.