Keynotes

Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman, Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT

Wednesday 8:45-10:15

It is hard to build robust systems: systems that have acceptable behavior over a larger class of situations than was anticipated by their designers. The most robust systems are evolvable: they can be easily adapted to new situations with only minor modification. How can we design systems that are flexible in this way?

Observations of biological systems tell us a great deal about how to make robust and evolvable systems. Techniques originally developed in support of symbolic Artificial Intelligence can be viewed as ways of enhancing robustness and evolvability in programs and other engineered systems. By contrast, common practice of computer science actively discourages the construction of robust systems.

Bio: Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic (formerly Matsushita) Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the S.B. and the Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 and 1973, respectively. He has been involved in artificial intelligence research at M.I.T. since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer languages, in computer architecture and in VLSI design.

John Lamping, Google

Thursday 9:00-10:30

A talk in three parts describing how a former Researcher now views research, especially separation of concerns:

1. We potential users are overwhelmed and don't know what we are doing.
2. Simple value propositions are the way to catch us, even if we may eventually want more complication.
3. We need aspects for data transformation.

Bio: John Lamping holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.He was a principal scientist at Xerox PARC, where he worked in various fields, including Aspect Oriented Programming, visualization, optimal lambda calculus evaluation, and natural language semantics. More recently, he has worked on document organization and retrieval at Stratify and at Google.

Adrian Colyer, Chief Scientist Interface21

Friday 9:00-10:30

How did AOP emerge from the world of research and academia to become a central part of the leading enterprise Java application development framework? Where are we now in terms of industry adoption, and what challenges lie ahead? Drawing on almost seven years of experience in using and promoting AOP in commercial settings, Adrian will present his unique perspective on these questions and on lessons that the AOSD community can learn to ensure it continues to make an impact into the future.

Bio: Adrian Colyer is the leader of the AspectJ open source project and a well-known industry expert on the topic of aspect-oriented programming (AOP). He is a co-author of the book Eclipse AspectJ: Aspect-Oriented Programming in Eclipse with AspectJ and AJDT, and has also published numerous book chapters, articles, and published papers. His short essay, AOP without the buzzwords has been described as “the best explanation of AOP, ever”.