Paola Inverardi (Università de L'Aquila, Italy)
Software of the future is the future of Software?
Software in the near ubiquitous future (Softure) will need to cope with variability, as software systems get deployed on an increasingly large diversity of computing platforms. Heterogeneity of the underlying communication and computing infrastructure, mobility and continuously evolving requirements demand new software paradigms that span the entire life-cycle from development to deployment and execution. Softure must be developed in a way that facilitates both its deployment over heterogeneous networks of heterogeneous nodes, and its interaction with end users, their environment and/or other existing systems, depending on the application domain. Moreover, Softure should be reliable and meet the user’s performance requirements and needs. Softure can greatly differ in nature, varying from complex and distributed software systems for highly dynamic networks of mobile nodes to embedded software systems for wireless, resource-constrained nodes. Additionally, the user-centric dimension of the new emerging applications requires Softure to be adaptive to a context that combines user-centric data (e.g., what is the information of interest for the user given his/her current situation?) and resource/computer-centric data (e.g., what is the service that can be delivered to the user given available energy?). Finally, due to its pervasiveness, Softure must be dependable, which is made more complex given the highly dynamic nature of service provision.

Supporting the development and execution of Softure systems raises numerous challenges, from elaborating languages, methods and tools for the systems’ thorough design and validation in order to ensure dependability of the self-adaptive systems that are targeted, to developing supporting middleware infrastructures in order to ease the implementation and deployment of the target systems on highly heterogeneous and dynamic platforms.

Are these challenges new in the software domain? Do their solutions suggest innovative ways of creating software systems?

In this talk I will discuss some of these challenges making reference to the approach undertaken in the IST PLASTIC project for a specific instance of Softure focused on software for Beyond 3G (B3G) networks. I will try to highlight what I consider innovative and futurist for software and what I simply consider software for the future.

Danny Krizanc (Wesleyan University, USA)
An Algorithmic Theory of Autonomous Mobile Agent Computing
Mobile agents are software entities with the ability to move from node to node in a network acting autonomously and in cooperation with other agents in order to accomplish a variety of tasks. Today they find applications in numerous computer environments such as search in peer-to-peer networks, Web crawlers, and surveillance of local area networks, just to mention a few. Interest in mobile agents has been fueled by two overriding concerns. First, to simplify the complexities of distributed computing, and second to overcome the limitations of user interfaces. In this talk we examine mobile agents from the perspective of traditional research on the complexity of distributed algorithms. We attempt to provide a framework for an algorithmic theory of mobile agent computing. Recent research in the area is examined within this framework.

Jayadev Misra (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Structured Concurrent Programming
Orc is a new language for task orchestration, a form of concurrent programming with applications in workflow, business process management, and web service orchestration. Orc provides constructs to orchestrate the concurrent invocation of services -- while managing time-outs, priorities, and failure of services or communication. In this talk, we give a tutorial introduction to Orc and then show a trace-based semantic model. Orc enjoys a number of properties, such as monotonicity and continuity, which are more common in functional programming. Despite the simplicity of the language and its semantic model, Orc is able to express a large variety of useful orchestration tasks.

Andrei Sabelfeld (Goteborg University, Sweden)
Dimensions of Declassification in Theory and Practice
Computing systems often deliberately release (or declassify) sensitive information. A principal security concern for systems permitting information release is whether this release is safe: is it possible that the attacker compromises the information release mechanism and extracts more secret information than intended?
While the security community has recognized the importance of the problem, the state-of-the-art in information release is, unfortunately, a number of approaches with somewhat unconnected semantic goals. We provide a road map of the main directions of current research, by classifying the basic goals according to what information is released, who releases information, where in the system information is released, and when information can be released.
We apply this classification in order to evaluate the security of the largest case study realized in a security-typed language to date -- an implementation of a non-trivial cryptographic protocol that allows playing online poker without a trusted third party.
In addition, we identify some prudent principles of declassification. These principles shed light on existing definitions and may also serve as useful "sanity checks" for emerging models.
The talk is based on an IEEE CSFW'05 paper written jointly with David Sands and an ESORICS'05 paper written jointly with Aslan Askarov.