5th International Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control
with SPLASH, October 26, 2015 @ Pittsburgh, USA
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):
The workshop will take place on Monday 26th October at room Grand Station 4.
Click the icon to download the preprint version of the paper and the icon to download the presentation slides.
Papers marked with have been accepted as full papers to be published on ACM DL.
The ACM proceedings of AGERE! 2015 can be downloaded here, and the companion proceedings are available here.
Start | End | Title | Authors | Download |
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08:30 | 10:00 | Keynote and Session 1: Abstraction | ||
8:30 | 9:20 |
Since its introduction as a parallel, agent-based modeling tool in the early 90’s, StarLogo has gone through several iterations that aim to make it more approachable to first-time programmers. The current version under development, StarLogo Nova, employs a blocks-based program editor and 3D visualization engine, all available online, and is used by tens of thousands of students across the United States. Rather than considering concurrent and/or distributed programming to be an advanced topic beyond the reach of beginners, StarLogo Nova is designed to give new learners immediate access to these concepts. Indeed, our current research shows that engaging with this sort of computational modeling in a well-designed curriculum increases student understanding of complex adaptive systems, providing a unifying lens through which to view many other disciplines. This talk will give a brief history of StarLogo, and then examine the language features, metaphors, and patterns of thought that enable novices to meaningfully engage in concurrent and distributed problem-solving during their first computing experiences in StarLogo Nova. |
Daniel Wendel | |
09:20 | 09:40 | Objects as Session-Typed Processes | Stephanie Balzer, Frank Pfenning | |
09:40 | 10:00 | Exploring AOP from an OOP Perspective | Rem Collier, Seán Russell, David Lillis | |
10:00 | 10:30 | Coffee break | ||
10:30 | 12:00 | Session 2: Abstraction and Runtime Environments | ||
10:30 | 10:50 | Bulk-Synchronous Communication Mechanisms in Diderot | Lamont Samuels, John Reppy | |
10:50 | 11:10 | Programming Abstractions for Augmented Worlds | Angelo Croatti, Alessandro Ricci | |
11:10 | 11:30 | Manyfold Actors: Extending the C++ Actor Framework to Heterogeneous Many-Core Machines using OpenCL | Raphael Hiesgen, Dominik Charousset, Thomas C. Schmidt | |
11:30 | 11:50 | A Performance and Scalability Analysis of Actor Message Passing and Migration in SALSA Lite | Travis Desell, Carlos Varela | |
12:00 | 13:30 | Lunch | ||
13:30 | 15:00 | Session 3: Types and Verification | ||
13:30 | 13:50 | Deny Capabilities for Safe, Fast Actors | Sylvan Clebsch, Sophia Drossopoulou | |
13:50 | 14:10 | Jacco: More Efficient Model Checking Toolset for Java Actor Programs | Arvin Zakeriyan, Ehsan Khamespanah, Marjan Sirjani, Ramtin Khosravi | |
14:10 | 14:30 | Actario: A Framework for Reasoning About Actor Systems | Shohei Yasutake, Takuo Watanabe | |
14:30 | 14:50 | A model-based approach to secure multi-party distributed systems | Najah Ben Said, Takoua Abdellatif, Saddek Bensalem, Marius Bozga | |
15:00 | 15:30 | Coffee break | ||
15:30 | 17:00 | Session 4: Runtime Environments and Discussion | ||
15:30 | 15:50 | Akka.js: Towards a portable actor runtime environment | Andrea Peruffo, Gianluca Stivan, Philipp Haller | |
15:50 | 16:10 | Connect.js: A cross mobile platform actor library for multi-networked mobile applications | Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Christophe Scholliers, Nicolas Larrea, Wolfgang De Meuter | |
16:10 | 16:30 | Optimizing Communicating Event-Loop Languages with Truffle | Stefan Marr, Hanspeter Mössenböck | |
16:30 | 17:00 | Brainstorm and discussion session |
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:
The workshop welcomes three main kinds of contributions:
Workshop: October 26, 2015
SPLASH early registration deadline: September 25, 2015
All deadlines are at 11:59 PM American Samoa Time (UTC-11).
Authors are invited to submit their papers in PDF using the ACM SIGPLAN style. Papers should be submitted via EasyChair.
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, and a twin special issue published in Computer Languages, Systems and Structures and in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, collecting best papers from AGERE! 2013 and 2014.
Elisa Gonzalez Boix is Assistant Professor at the Software Languages Lab (SOFT) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. She obtained her Master in Informatics Engineering in 2004 from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain) and her PhD in Sciences in 2012 from VUB on programming language abstractions and tools for handling partial failures in distributed applications running on mobile ad hoc networks. Her PhD heavily relied on reflection and meta-level programming. She has also been active in the design and development of the distributed actor-based AmbientTalk language, prototyping its first concurrency model based on active objects. In the recent past, she has co-organized the SCRIPT 2013 workshop (Secure Cloud and Reactive Internet Programming Technology) and the prior edition of AGERE! in 2014. Her current research focusses on implementation technology to support the design of both programming languages and tools for mobile and cloud systems.
Philipp Haller is Assistant Professor in the Theoretical Computer Science Group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He was a co-organizer of the 2014 edition of AGERE! held in conjunction with SPLASH. Prior to his current appointment, he was a consultant and researcher at Typesafe Switzerland. Dr.~Haller received his Dipl.-Inform. with distinction (2006) from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and his PhD (2010) in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He previously held appointments at Stanford University (2011-2012) and EPFL (2011-2012). Dr.Haller has served on the program committees of the 2nd and the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control (AGERE! 2012, 2013), and the 27th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2013), among others. He has also served as co-chair of the 4th and the 5th Scala Workshop (SCALA 2013, 2014).
Alessandro Ricci was one of the co-organizers of the previous editions of AGERE! held in conjunction with SPLASH (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014). His main research interests are about high-level programming paradigms for designing and developing complex software systems, in particular based on agents and multi-agent systems, so agent-oriented programming, agent-oriented software engineering. His previous experience in co-organizing events includes: ProMAS (“Programming Multi-Agent Systems”), a workshop inside the AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems) conference in 2007, AT2AI-6 (Sixth International Workshop ‘From Agent Theory to Agent Implementation”) at AAMAS 2008, ESAW (“Engineering Societies of Agents”) work- shop in 2006, and ACM Symposium of Applied Computing (SAC), Special Track on Coordination Models, Languages and Applications (in 2006 and 2007).
Carlos A. Varela Carlos A. Varela is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the Worldwide Computing Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Varela received his B.S with honors, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Varela is Associate Editor of the ACM Computing Surveys and the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. Dr. Varela was the Program Committee Chair for the 2011 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2011) and the 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2012.) Dr. Varela has been a member of approximately fifty other conference and workshop Program Committees. Dr. Varela has given eleven invited plenary lectures at international and national venues. He has supervised three Ph.D. dissertations and nine M.S. theses. Dr. Varela received Best Paper awards at HPDC-GECO'2006, eScience'2007, CCGrid'2007, and CLEI'2010. He is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, two IBM Innovation Awards, and an Amazon Research Award.
For questions please contact: agere@soft.vub.ac.be.
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