Tom Van Cutsem
Tom Van Cutsem
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Faculty of Sciences, DINF – SOFT
Pleinlaan 2
B-1050 Brussels
Belgium
- Office:
- 10 F 740
- Tel.:
- +32 2 629 3490
- Fax:
- E-mail:
- tvcutsem@vub.ac.be
- vCard:
- Tom Van Cutsem
- Homepage
- http://soft.vub.ac.be/~tvcutsem
Research Interests
| Title | Programming language abstractions for concurrent, distributed and parallel programming |
|---|---|
| Keywords | programming languages, concurrency, parallelism, multicore programming, coordination, events, actors, traits, reflection, distributed objects, mobile computing, AmbientTalk, Javascript, Erlang, Clojure |
| Publications | Recent |
Short Research Description
Language abstractions for concurrent, distributed and parallel programming
My research focuses on programming language design for concurrent and distributed systems. Within the Software Languages Lab, my main research track falls within the scope of the ambient-oriented programming domain. Our goal is to enable the creation of distributed programs that can better abstract from network failures in ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments. In this context, I co-designed and developed the ambient-oriented programming language AmbientTalk/2, a distributed language tailored for writing programs to be deployed in mobile ad hoc networks and on cell phones. My doctoral dissertation introduced “ambient references”, a novel type of object reference enabling anonymous and asynchronous many-to-many interactions between software objects in a wireless network.
My other research interest include synchronization and concurrency control abstractions in general and event-driven programming in particular, parallel programming languages, software composition abstractions, object models, computational reflection, metaprogramming, programming language interoperability, web applications and next-generation live and visual programming languages.
More information on:
- My PhD research topic: ambient references.
Updates
Most recent news is on my homepage.
- My recent work focuses on novel language abstractions for parallel programming. I have also created a 30-hour Master-level course on Multicore programming in which I explore Fork/Join parallelism, MapReduce in Erlang and Software-transactional Memory in Clojure.
- Since 2010 I am a member of ECMA TC39, the Javascript standardization committee.
- From November 2009 until April 2010 I was a Visiting Faculty member at Google Research in Mountain View, California, USA. My focus there was on reflective and distributed programming language features for Javascript, specifically Harmony Proxies. I also developed a library for trait composition in Javascript called traits.js.
- Last October, I presented a tutorial on event-driven concurrency at OOPSLA 2009. Please check the OOPSLA tutorial website for details.