Wed, 04 September 2019, 14:00 - 15:00
Organizador:
DI/NOVA LINCS
Local do evento:
Edifício II
Localização específica:
Sala de seminários DI
A Tale of Distributed Transparency and Partial Failures
By: Elisa Gonzalez Boix (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Abstract:
Even though distributed systems are wide-spread, building them is still hard due to their inherent concurrency combined with the fact that components can fail independently, i.e. failures are partial. In order to support the systematic construction of distributed systems, my research tries to aid developers with both novel programming constructs and tool support.
In this talk I will first reflect on the research in the context of the AmbientTalk language conducted at the SOFT lab over the past decade. AmbientTalk is a distributed actor-based programming language specially designed to aid the construction of distributed applications running on mobile ad hoc networks. I will introduce AmbientTalk’s key programming features based on ambient-oriented programming. In particular, I will stress my research exploring the trade-off between novel programming abstractions that aid with the difficulties of failure handling, on the one hand, and providing mechanisms that allow developers to be aware of their effects and take them into account in the design and construction of applications, on the other hand. I will then describe recent work which pushes further ambient-oriented programming research into the area of edge computing and geo-replicated applications.
Host short bio:
Elisa Gonzalez Boix is a full-time professor at the Software Languages Lab (SOFT) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. She obtained her degree in Informatics Engineering in 2004 from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain) and her PhD in Sciences in 2012 from VUB. She has been active in the design and development of the distributed actor-based AmbientTalk language, prototyping its first concurrency model based on active objects as part of her master thesis in 2003. After a short period in industry working for IBM DB2 tooling group, she returned to academia in 2005 to re-join the AmbientTalk research group. Since 2008 she has also used AmbientTalk to teach distributed and mobile programming to master level students. Late 2014, she became a professor at the SOFT lab where she leads a group on concurrent and distributed systems, focusing on programming abstractions and software tools like debuggers.
