SAC 2010 - Speaker

Abstract
Since programming became a profession, every decade has brought a major advance. What will be the contribution of the next ten years? This talk makes an attempt at predicting how we will program ca. 2020, a target date close enough to permit realistic confirmation, or falsification, of the predictions. In particular, it examines today's most visible research developments and discusses which ones have a chance of making it to the practice of ordinary programmers; it also discusses how current and new techniques can help software developers cope with society's increasing software demands, both quantitative and qualitative.

The discussion takes examples from the work of many currently active groups in various academic and industrial organizations, and gives special attention to the developments taking place at the ETH Chair of Software Engineering and Eiffel Software in the area of software verification (both tests and proofs), concurrency, programming language mechanisms and development environments.

Speaker's Bio
Bertrand Meyer is Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and Chief Architect of Eiffel Software, based in Santa Barbara (California). He is the author of numerous articles and over ten books on many topics of software engineering, including the best-seller "Object-Oriented Software Construction" (Prentice Hall). He is an ACM Fellow and has received the ACM Software System Award and the Dahl-Nygaard prize for object technology, and is a member of the French academy of technologies. His most recent book, "Touch of Class: An Introduction to Programming Well using Objects and Contracts" (Springer) applies advanced software engineering techniques to the introductory teaching of programming.

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Thursday March 25, 2010
9:00 - 10:40AM

P2P, DSM, and Other Products of the Complexity Factory

Dr. Willy Zwaenepoel
Professor and Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Abstract
In order to get your paper accepted at a major conference, the idea you develop in the paper must be complex, preferably even incomprehensible to all but the few experts. In order to have your idea have any impact in a real system, it must be simple and comprehensible to the above-average programmer in industry. The obvious net result of this contradiction is that very few papers at major conferences have any impact in real systems. This talk will explore some examples of this dilemma, some counterexamples of ideas that were successfully transferred to practice, and some ideas on how we can perhaps improve the situation.

Speaker's Bio
Willy Zwaenepoel is Professor and Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He received his BS/MS from the University of Gent, Belgium, in 1979, and his MS and PhD from Stanford in 1980 and 1984, respectively.

He has worked in a variety of aspects of operating systems and distributed systems, including microkernels, fault tolerance, parallel scientific computing on clusters of workstations, clusters for web services, mobile computing, and database replication. He is most well known for his work on the Treadmarks distributed shared memory system, which was licensed to Intel and became the basis for Intel’s OpenMP cluster product. His work on high-performance software for network I/O led to the creation of iMimic Networking, Inc, which he led from 2000 to 2005. His current projects include I/O performance of virtual machines, symbolic execution, and software update mechanisms.

Before joining EPFL in 2002, Willy Zwaenepoel was on the faculty at Rice University, where he was the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1998, and Fellow of the ACM in 2000. He won best paper awards at SigComm 1984, OSDI 1999, Usenix 2000, Usenix 2006 and Eurosys 2007. He was program chair of OSDI in 1996 and Eurosys in 2006, and general chair of Mobisys in 2004. He is the 2000 recipient of the Rice University Graduate Student Association Teaching and Mentoring Award, and the 2007 recipient of the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai Award for his work in distributed computing. He was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2008.