David Garlan

Within an increasing number of domains an important emerging need is the ability for technically unsavvy users to compose computational elements into novel configurations. Examples include astronomers who create new analysis pipelines to process telescopic data, intelligence analysis who must process diverse sources of unstructured text to discover socio-technical trends, and medical researchers who have to process MRI data in new ways to understand disease pathways. Creating such compositions today typically requires low-level technical expertise, limiting the use of computational methods and increasing the cost of using them. In this talk we explore the idea of “end-user architecting” – or, the ability for end users to compose rich computational systems through domain-specific compositional paradigms, without requiring that they have knowledge of the low-level implementation details of the components or the compositional infrastructure. End-user architecting draws on the rich heritage of software architecture languages and tools, but adapts these to the specific needs of users without deep technical expertise in software systems. Further, it examines the socio-technical ecosystem context that must be understood to address the problem in an effective way.