The speaker at this Friday's Informatics Seminar will be Kane Kim. This week's seminar will be a joint seminar between the Department of Informatics and the Department of Computer Science. The Informatics Seminar this week will be held on Friday at 3pm in ICS 432, followed by a social hour at 4pm. See you there.

Abstract:

" Emergence of ubiquitous computing societies (UCSs) means enormous increase in both the number of computing nodes connected together and the number of distributed computing (DC) applications. That in turn means enormous increase in the complexity of DC occurring. Without a new-generation DC software engineering technology, application systems such as next-generation multi-party video-conferencing systems, real-time virtual reality systems, systems of cooperating autonomous ground vehicles, and next-generation secure villages and towns, cannot be constructed with sufficient economy, efficiency, and reliability. A major part of a new-generation DC software engineering technology should be a new-generation software building-block (BB). A substantial percentage of new-generation DC applications are of RT computing types which involve actions subject to relatively high-precision timing requirements. Therefore, desired BBs must be effective in constructing RT DC application systems.

The TMO (Time-triggered Message-triggered Object) programming and specification scheme is intended to facilitate RT distributed programming and software engineering in a form which software engineers in the vast business software field can adapt to with relatively small efforts. It is also aimed for enabling system engineers to produce certifiable RT computing systems for safety-critical applications in cost-effective and sufficiently confident manners. Its support tools can be based on well-established OO programming languages such as C++, C#, and JAVA and on ubiquitous commercial RT operating system kernels or even on MS Windows. In addition, the TMO scheme facilitates an attractively simple approach to parallel and distributed RT simulation. Experiences have shown that undergraduate senior students can learn the TMO tools and methodology and become reasonably proficient in networked embedded system programming. In this seminar, the underlying design paradigm and the essence of the scheme, the tools (including middleware supporting reliable execution of TMOs on various platforms such as notebook, PDA, and single-board ITX PC, associated APIs, GUI-based design aids, and analysis tools) and application demonstrations built so far, and remaining research issues, will be introduced."