Managing the complexity of component based systems
Dr. Pietro Abate (UniversitA Paris Diderot / Irill - INRIA )
COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINARDATE: 2012-01-10
TIME: 15:30:00 - 16:30:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.
ABSTRACT:
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are rather peculiar instances of component-based software platforms. They are developed rapidly and without tight central coordination, they are huge (tens to thousands components per platform), and their importance in the Internet computing infrastructure is growing.
Both the construction of a coherent collection of components and the maintenance of installations based on these raise difficult problems for distribution maintainers and system administrators. Distributions evolve rapidly by releasing new component versions and strive for increasingly high Quality Assurance (QA) requirements on their component collections. System upgrades may proceed on different paths depending on the current state of the system and the available components, and system administrators are faced with difficult choices of upgrade paths and with frequent upgrade failures.
The now concluded project MANCOOSI (Managing the Complexity of the Open
Source Infrastructure) aims to solve some of these problems. I will
describe current and past work done in the context of MANCOOSI and
some future directions.
BIO:
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Australian National University
(ANU) in 2006 focusing theoretical computer science. During my Ph.D. I
developed the Tableau WorkBench, a generic theorem prover that is both easy to
use and flexible accepting specification in different formats. The TWB has
been used to experiment with a number of modal logics and in particular with
fix-point logics.
In the last 5 years I've been involved with two academic research projects, Cduce and Mancoosi founded by European community. Recently I have joined the center for research and innovation on Free Software (irill). I'm a strong supporter of the Debian project (despite I never officially joined it ).
My current academic interests are software engineering, theorem proving,
functional programming, modal logic. My focus at the moment is on open source
and in particular in relation to quality assurance aspects of software
distribution and component based system.
