ISR Colloquium Speaker

Robert Filman

Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS/USRA)
“Aspects, Wrappers, and Events”
Friday, February 21, 2003 - 10:30am to 12:00pm
Faculty Host: 
RSVP: 

RSVPs requested to Christopher Stringer, cms @ ics.uci.edu

Location: 
Main Library, Room 570
Cost: 

No cost to attend.

Directions: 

Click here for directions and parking information.

Abstract: 

For many applications, most code is not devoted to implementing the primary input-output functionality but instead addresses other concerns, such as reliability, availability, responsiveness, performance, security, and manageability. Conventional programming practice requires the programmer to keep all these other ilities in mind while coding and to explicitly invoke behavior at exactly the right places to achieve them.

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is an emerging technology for allowing the separate specification and coding of multiple concerns, while nevertheless providing mechanisms to automatically meld these separate expressions into working programs. In this talk I will present a pair of AOP systems, our past work on the Object Infrastructure Framework (OIF) and our current work on event-based quantification, and provide some observations on the distinguishing characteristics of AOP technology.

OIF is a distributed object technology that implements separate concerns as dynamic wrappers on object components. Interesting elements of OIF include its mechanisms for application and aspect communication, its dynamic nature, and its language for expressing where aspects apply to base code. I will also describe our initial work on event-based quantification, an attempt to map directed and widely the interesting properties of programs into transformations that realize those properties.

About the Speaker: 

Robert E. Filman is a Senior Scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RAICS) at NASA Ames Research Center, working on frameworks for developing distributed applications. Prior to coming to NASA in May 1999, Dr. Filman worked in the research groups of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, IntelliCorp, and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, and on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Internet Computing and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution and the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Tools. He is the author (with Daniel P. Friedman) of Coordinated Computing: Tools and Techniques for Distributed Software (McGraw-Hill), and is currently editing the book Aspect Oriented Software Development with Mehmet Aksit, Siobhan Clarke, and Tzilla Elrad. He has worked and published in the areas of software engineering, distributed computing, network security, programming languages, artificial intelligence, and human-machine interface. Dr. Filman received his B. S. (Mathematics), M.S. (Computer Science) and Ph. D. (Computer Science) from Stanford University.