ăgo ăgo, ăgis, egi, actum, ăgĕre

latin verb meaning to act, to lead, to do, common root for actors and agents.

The fundamental turn of software into concurrency and distribution is not only a matter of performance, but also of design and abstraction. It calls for programming paradigms that, compared to current mainstream paradigms, would allow us to more naturally think about, design, develop, execute, debug, and profile systems exhibiting different degrees of concurrency, autonomy, decentralization of control, and physical distribution.

AGERE! is an ACM SIGPLAN workshop dedicated to focusing on and developing the research on programming systems, languages and applications based on actors, agents and any related programming paradigm promoting a decentralized mindset in solving problems and in developing systems to implement such solutions.

All stages of software development are considered interesting for the workshop, including requirements, modeling, formalisation, prototyping, design, implementation, tooling, testing, and any other means of producing running software based on actors and agents as first-class abstractions. The scope of the workshop includes aspects that concern both the theory and the practice of design and programming using such paradigms, so as to bring together researchers working on models, languages and technologies, as well as practitioners using such technologies to develop real-world systems and applications.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

• Foundations: ideas, concepts, formalization of the computation and programming models for concurrent objects, actors, agents, and decentralized control programming
• Programming languages: theory and practice of languages based on actors/concurrent objects/agents (typing, modularity, mechanism for extensibility, reuse, etc)
• Libraries, frameworks and middleware platforms based on actors, concurrent objects, agents and high-level paradigms for concurrent/distributed/asynchronous programming
• Programming techniques
• Actor-based / agent-based programming idioms/li>
• Integration with mainstream programming models and languages: theoretical and practical aspects of exploiting actors/agents and related models/technologies with other reference approaches to concurrent/asynchronous programming, such as software transactional memory, data-flow programming and reactive programming
• Design principles underlying relevant paradigms and bridging the gap between design and programming
• Design patterns for actor/agent based systems
• Validation and verification: theory and tools about testing, debugging, profiling, verifying and validating software systems based on such paradigms
• Applications: design and development of real-world applications
• Teaching: experiences and reflections about using these paradigms in teaching programming (e.g. concurrent, distributed programming- but not only)

The workshop will take place on Monday 20th October.

Click the icon to download the paper and the icon to download the presentation slides.

Papers marked with have been accepted as regular papers to be published on ACM DL.

Start	End	Title	Authors	Download
8:30	8:35	Welcome and introduction
8:35	9:35	Invited Talk: Upgrade Programming for Mobile Cloud	Gul Agha
9:35	10:00	Selectors: Actors with Multiple Guarded Mailboxes	Shams Imam and Vivek Sarkar
10:00	10:30	Coffee break
10:30	10:52	Fault Tolerant Distributed Computing using Asynchronous Local Checkpointing	Phillip Kuang, John Field and Carlos A. Varela
10:52	11:14	Scaling-Up Behavioral Programming: Steps from Basic Principles to Application Architectures	David Harel and Guy Katz
11:14	11:36	Multiple Inheritance in AgentSpeak(L)-style Programming Languages	Dhaon Akshat and Rem Collier
11:36	12:00	From Actor Event-Loop to Agent Control-Loop - Impact on Programming	Alessandro Ricci
12:00	13:30	Lunch
13:30	13:52	CAF - The C++ Actor Framework for Scalable and Resource-efficient Applications	Dominik Charousset, Raphael Hiesgen and Thomas Schmidt
13:52	14:14	An Automatic Actors to Threads Mapping Technique for JVM-based Actor Frameworks	Ganesha Upadhyaya and Hridesh Rajan
14:14	14:36	Event-based Analysis of Timed Rebeca Models using SQL	Brynjar Magnusson, Ehsan Khamespanah, Marjan Sirjani and Ramtin Khosravi
14:36	15:00	Efficient TCTL Model Checking Algorithm for Timed Actors	Ehsan Khamespanah, Ramtin Khosravi and Marjan Sirjani
15:00	15:30	Coffee break
15:30	15:45	Short Paper: Savina - An Actor Benchmark Suite	Shams Imam and Vivek Sarkar
15:45	16:00	Poster advertisements:	Composita: Bringing Order to Agent Communications Luc Bläser Modular Reasoning in Capsule Mehdi Bagherzadeh and Hridesh Rajan Supporting Relative Location Constraints in Actor Systems Hua Zhang, Xinghui Zhao and Nadeem Jamali
16:00	16:50	Brainstorm and discussion session
16:50	17:00	Wrap-up and closing remarks

The goal of the workshop is to serve as a forum for collecting, discussing, and confronting related research works that typically appear in different communities in the context of (distributed) artificial intelligence, distributed computing, computer programming, language design and software engineering.

The workshop will be organized as a one-day workshop, integrating both:

• a part featuring a mini-conference style, like previous editions, reserving some time slots for the presentation and discussion of those accepted contributions that are meant to be published on the formal proceedings on the ACM DL.


• a part featuring a brainstorming style, more targeted to solicit the discussion of ideas/challenges/new directions, etc. raised by the set of position/work-in-progress papers submitted to the workshop and selected by the PC.

The workshop welcomes three main kinds of contributions:

• Mature contributions: full papers presenting new previously unpublished research in one or more of the topics identified above. They will be published on the ACM Digital Library as an official ACM SIGPLAN publication.


• Position papers and work-in-progress contributions: short papers introducing a contribution (an idea, a viewpoint, an argument, work in progress...) which may be in its initial stage and not fully developed but which is worth being presented given its relevance to the AGERE! topics, to trigger discussions and interactions. They will be included in the informal proceedings.


• Demos: these contributions should be about a technology/system that will be presented and discussed during the event.


• Posters: these contributions are aimed to exploit the event to discuss with other participants about an idea and get feedback for future work. Posters will be presented and discussed during coffee breaks; some topics may be selected for inclusion in the discussion session.

Workshop: October 20, 2014

Camera ready version of papers and posters: October 12, 2014

SPLASH early registration deadline: September 19, 2014

Full papers

• Abstract deadline: August 3, 2014Extended: August 10, 2014
• Paper deadline: August 10, 2014Extended: August 17, 2014
• Notification: September 7, 2014 September 17, 2014

Position/work-in-progress papers

• Deadline: September 7, 2014
• Notification: September 17, 2014

Posters

• Deadline: October 2, 2014
• Notification: October 6, 2014

All deadlines are at 11:59 PM American Samoa Time (UTC-11).

Authors are invited to submit their papers in PDF using the ACM SIG Proceedings style. Papers should be submitted via EasyChair.

• long papers: up to 10 pages, including references
• short papers and demos: up to 4 pages, excluding references
• posters: authors may send 2-pages extended abstract + poster draft to ageresplash2014@easychair.org

A special issue on a reference journal will be organized with the extended and revised version of the best papers accepted and presented to the workshop. This special issue follows a previous one published in Science of Computer Programming, collecting best papers from AGERE! 2011 and 2012.