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--- people [2010/05/04 15:31] – dharnie
+++ people [2012/05/02 16:23] – tvcutsem
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 ~~NOTOC~~
 ===== People =====
-The people behind the AmbientTalk project are: 1 professor, 1 post-doc researcher and 6 PhD students from the [[http://prog.vub.ac.be|Programming Technology Laboratory]] of the [[http://www.vub.ac.be|Vrije Universiteit Brussel]].
+These are the people behind the AmbientTalk project of the [[http://soft.vub.ac.be|Software Languages Lab]].
-{{ ambientpeople.jpg?400 }}
-//Part of the ambient group in June 2007. From left to right: Jorge Vallejos, Jessie Dedecker, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Stijn Timbermont, Wolfgang De Meuter, Tom Van Cutsem.//
 == Prof. Dr. Wolfgang De Meuter ==
@@ Line 39: / Line 34: @@
 =====
-== Stijn Mostinckx ==
+== Kevin Pinte ==
-[[http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smostinc|Homepage]]
-The goal of my research is the development of elegant programming models which allow applications to respond to dynamic changes in their environment. As a means to detect such changes, we explore the [[crime:factspaces|Fact Space Model]], which provides a means to reason about one's current context.
+Our everyday environment will soon be pervaded with RFID tags, tiny chips that can be integrated into any physical object. The tags can store and distribute information about the object or its environment. RFID technology is a key technology in developing pervasive context-aware applications.
+I am investigating new programming abstractions to develop //mobile RFID-enabled applications//. These are applications running on mobile devices such as smartphones or PDAs that spontaneously interact with the [objects in the] user's environment using by communicating with tagged objects. Mobile RFID-enabled applications both disperse application-specific data to and process contextual data from tagged physical objects. The programmer must dispose of adequate tools to deal with RFID hardware characteristics.
+Currently programming such applications is problematic. Communicating with RFID tags is prone to many failures as the connections with tags are extremely volatile and RFID tags have a small range of operation. State-of-the-art RFID applications heavily rely on infrastructure and merely employ RFID tags as digital barcodes, not exploiting the writable memory on the tags. As a consequence mobile RFID-enabled applications have to be developed in an ad hoc way, building upon low-level hardware abstractions leaving the developer to deal with RFID hardware characteristics manually.
+You can find more information about my work [[:research:rfid|here]].
+=====
+== Dries Harnie ==
+Thanks to the work of the other people on this page, programming applications for mobile devices is now as easy as, say, writing a blog. However, research so far has focused on one-to-one communication and how the properties of MANETs disrupt it.
+In the Real World(tm) we do group communication without giving it a second thought, changing conversation topics as people leave and rejoin the group. Likewise, we effortlessly do service composition: comparing prices for stuff we want to buy or finding interesting activities for a trip. Doing these things with current technology requires a lot of "bookkeeping code" because it can only track the connectivity of one link at a time.
+My research intends to provide abstractions that bind a number of services residing on different mobile devices into coherent entities. Programmers can then use these abstractions to communicate with groups of services as easily as with single services.
+=====
+== Lode Hoste ==
+[[http://soft.vub.ac.be/~lhoste|Homepage]]
+My research focuses on investigating programming language support to deal with the massive amount of concurrent events generated by various input devices. By providing adequate software abstractions for correlating multiple input devices we try to encourage multimodal gestural interaction and ease their implementations.
+The relation of my research and AmOP is the //spontaneous collaborative manipulation of digital information//. One scenario is that multiple people can interact using their laptop or mobile device with a shared virtual smart-board over a wireless network. Another scenario is the peer-to-peer data exchange where one users 'throws' (gesture 1) data and another users 'catches' (gesture 2) it. This type of interaction is both distributed in the //actions// they perform (correlate the 'throw' and 'catch' from different devices) and in the //data// that is exchanged.
+=====
+== Eline Philips ==
+Nomadic networks fill the gap between fixed networks and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) as they consist of a group of mobile devices that can move around dynamically while trying to maintain a connection with a fixed infrastructure. My research focusses on the coordination of nomadic services by making use of workflows as they provide an additional layer of abstraction such that interactions among application components can be specified on a higher level and be reused because of their loose coupling with the fine-grained application logic. Unfortunately, current workflow systems do not meet all the requirements for the kinds of applications that we envision in nomadic networks, like connection
+volatility.
+AmbientTalk is a programming language which treats disconnections at the very heart of its computational model. Moreover, the language supports dynamic service discovery which is opportune for nomadic networks. Although this language is suited for writing applications for MANETs, the orchestration of these applications is still programmed in an ad hoc manner. Complex nomadic applications that consist of asynchronously executing distributed services become hard to develop, understand and reuse. I am currently working on the addition of an abstraction layer on top of AmbientTalk which implements
+workflow patterns. I am investigating which new patterns for nomadic networks can be added to this abstraction layer. Concretely, I want support for intensional descriptions of services, group communication, compensating actions and more advanced synchronisation.
-My ongoing research investigates which abstractions can be used to handle the events produced by an implementation of the fact space model. An interesting path that I am currently exploring is the use of [[research:recap|reactive context-aware programming]].
 =====
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 in its environment. Currently, I am working on an extension of this model that allows applications to work on shared and replicated data.
 The use of weak data replication in a mobile environment ensures that there is no need to stop an ongoing application when certain data cannot be synchronized.
-=====
-== Stijn Timbermont ==
- In an Ambient Intelligent setting, various kinds of hardware are involved, each with its own characteristics. To allow abstraction over the different devices, a standard virtual machine approach is not feasible because it is not possible to abstract over all the devices at the same time. Instead, each device will require an individually adapted virtual machine.
-This reseach proposes a new way to develop virtual machines for Ambient Intelligence. Instead of manually modifying the virtual machine for of a particular device, the virtual machine can be generated by composing reusable modules. The first step is to determine the set of modules that can be used to build a virtual machine. The next step is to find implementation and composition techniques that guarantee the correctness and efficiency of the generated virtual machine.
 =====
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 =====
 === Former Members ===
+== Stijn Mostinckx ==
+In the past, I have contributed to the formulation of the ambient-oriented programming paradigm and have co-designed the current incarnation of AmbientTalk.  Currently, my research focus is the study of elegant mechanisms to allow applications to respond to dynamic changes in their environment.
+A first element of the solution I propose is the use of pattern matching rules to succinctly describe which changes to the environment are relevant.  Applying such rules over a [[crime:factspaces|federated fact space]] -- which transparently combines the information provided by all reachable devices -- proves to be a declarative means to coordinate and contextualize the behavior of distributed applications.
+The second element of the proposed solution is the use of [[research:rp|reactive programming]]: a programming model centered on the use of time-varying //reactive values//. Their unique //contagion// semantics allow building event-driven software without any event handlers, thus avoiding the problems engendered by inversion of control.
+The approach that combines and integrates these elements is the  [[research:recap|reactive context-aware programming]] paradigm, an extension of the ambient-oriented programming paradigm which is tailored for the Internet of Things.
 == Dr. Jessie Dedecker ==