[aosd-announce] Call for Position Papers: Workshop on Coordination and Adaptation Techniques at ECOOP'2004

Thu Mar 11 04:22:47 EST 2004

- sorry for multiple receptions -

Dear colleagues,

please find below the call for position papers for the Workshop on 
Coordination and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities which will 
take place in conjunction with ECOOP'2004.
As you will see in the topics, aspect-oriented approaches for adaptation 
is one of the topics of interests.

Best regards,

P. Poizat

                    CALL FOR POSITION PAPERS

                             WCAT'04

         First International Workshop on Coordination
        and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities

                      http://WCAT04.unex.es

                                     held in conjunction with:

                                     ECOOP 2004 Conference
                                     http://www.ifi.uio.no/ecoop2004
                                     June 14-18, 2004
                                     Oslo, Norway

         CONTENTS
         ========

         * Abstract
	* Organizers
	* Important dates
         * Description
	* Topics of interest
	* Participation
	* Submission procedure
	* Workshop format
	* Post-workshop publication
	* About the organizers

************
   ABSTRACT
************

   The new challenges raised by complex distributed systems have promoted
the development of specific fields of Software Engineering such as
Coordination. This discipline addresses the interaction issues among
software entities (either considered as subsystems, objects, components,
or more recently web-services) that collaborate to provide some
functionality.

   A serious limitation of currently available interface descriptions is
that they do not provide suitable means to specify and reason on the
interacting behaviour of complex systems. Indeed, while the notation used
provide convenient ways to describe the typed signatures of software
entities, they offer a quite limited support to describe their concurrent
behaviour. As a consequence, when an entity or component is going to be
reused, one can only be sure that it provides the required interface, but
nothing else can be inferred about the behaviour of the component with
regard to the interaction protocol required by its environment.

   To deal with this problem, a new discipline, which we could name as
Software Adaptation, is emerging. Software Adaptation promotes the use of
adaptors ---specific computational entities which main goal is to guarantee
that software components will interact in the right way not only at the
signature level, but also at the protocol and semantic levels. In this
sense, software adaptation can be considered as a new generation of
coordination models.

   W-CAT’04 tries to provide a venue where researchers and practitioners
on these topics can meet, exchange ideas and problems, identify some of
the key issues related to coordination and adaptation, and explore together
and disseminate possible solutions.

**************
   ORGANIZERS
**************

     Carlos Canal
        University of Málaga (Spain)
        E-mail: canal at lcc.uma.es
        Web: http://www.lcc.uma.es/~canal	

     Juan Manuel Murillo
       University of Extremadura (Spain)
       E-mail: juanmamu at unex.es
       Web: http://quercusseg.unex.es	

     Pascal Poizat
       University of Evry (France)
       E-mail: poizat at lami.univ-evry.fr
       Web: http://www.lami.univ-evry.fr/~poizat

*******************
   IMPORTANT DATES
*******************

   Submission Due: April 5, 2004

   Notification of acceptance: April 25, 2004

   Workshop: June 14 or 15, 2004 (to be decided)

***************
   DESCRIPTION
***************

   In the recent years, the need for more and more complex software,
supporting new services and for wider application domains, together with
the advances in the net technology, have promoted the development of
distributed systems. These applications are constituted by a collection
of interacting entities (either considered as subsystems, objects,
components, or more recently web-services) that collaborate to provide
some functionality.

   One of the most complex tasks when designing such applications is to
specify the coordinated interaction that occurs among the computational
entities. This fact has favoured the development of a specific field in
Software Engineering devoted to the Coordination of software. Some of
the issues addressed by such discipline are:

   1. To provide the highest expressive power to specify any coordination
   pattern. These patterns detail the order in which the tasks developed by
   each component of the distributed application have to be executed. The
   state of the global computation determines the set of tasks that can be
   performed in each instant.

   2. To promote the re-usability both of the coordinated entities, and
   also of the coordination patterns. The coordinated entities could be
   used in any other application in which their functionality is required,
   apart from the coordination pattern that directs them. The same holds
   for the coordination patterns; they could be used in a different
   application, managing a different collection of entities with different
   behaviour and different interfaces, but with the same coordination
   needs.

   In fact, the ability of reusing existing software has always been a
major concern of Software Engineering. In particular, the need of
reusing and integrating heterogeneous software parts is at the root of
the so-called Component-Based Software Development. The paradigm "write
once, run forever" is currently supported by several component-oriented
platforms.

   However, a serious limitation of available component-oriented platforms
(with regard to reusability) is that they do not provide suitable means
to describe and reason on the interacting behaviour of component-based
systems. Indeed, while these platforms provide convenient ways to
describe the typed signatures of software entities via interface
description languages (IDLs), they offer a quite limited and low-level
support to describe their concurrent behaviour. As a consequence, when a
component is going to be reused, one can only be sure that it provides
the required interface but nothing else can be inferred about the
behaviour of the component with regard to the interaction protocol
required by the environment.

   To deal with this problem, a new discipline that we could name as
Software Adaptation, is emerging. Software Adaptation focuses on the
problems related to reusing existing software entities when constructing
a new application, and promotes the use of adaptors ---specific
computational entities for solving these problems. The main goal of
software adaptors is to guarantee that software components will interact
in the right way not only at the signature level but also at the
protocol and semantic levels. In this sense, Software Adaptation can be
considered as a new generation of Coordination Models.

**********************
   TOPICS OF INTEREST
**********************

   Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

      * New Coordination Models separating the interaction concern.
      * Aspect-oriented approaches to software adaptation.
      * Coordination and adaptation in concurrent and distributed
        object-oriented systems.
      * Interface and choreography description of Web-Services.
      * Coordination and adaptation middleware.
      * Rigorous approaches to software adaptation.
      * Identification and specification of interaction requirements.
      * Patterns and frameworks for component look-up and adaptation
      * Automatic generation of adaptors.
      * Documenting components to enable software composition and
        adaptation.
      * Metrics and prediction models for software adaptation.
      * Extra-functional properties in their relation to coordination and
        adaptation.
      * Tools and environments.
      * Industrial and experience reports.

*****************
   PARTICIPATION
*****************

   W-CAT’04 tries to provide a venue where researchers and
practitioners on these topics can meet, exchange ideas and problems,
identify some of the key issues related to coordination and adaptation,
and explore together and disseminate possible solutions. To enable
lively and productive discussions, attendance will be limited to 20
participants, and submission of a position paper (about five or six
pages) is required.

   Position papers should describe authors’ knowledge and experience
in the field of the coordination and adaptation of software. However,
submissions should not take the form of full or technical papers
describing authors’ research and their results. On the contrary,
submissions should describe the state-of-the-art in this field, address
open issues, present the point-of-view of the authors and theirs
proposals (probably including a succinct description of the technical
means being used), and reference relevant work in the field, by the
authors themselves or by others.

   Description of work-in-progress, open questions and participants’
expectations on the workshop is strongly encouraged. Hence, we suggest
that position papers contain a specific final section named Open Issues
in which the authors identify a number of (typically three or five) open
questions in their work that cause them special problems or that they
think relevant for the rest of the community.

   Attending to these bases, submissions will be selected for participation
by the organizers. All selected papers will be made available to
participants, who should read them prior to the workshop to foster a
lively discussion and improve the productivity.

************************
   SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
************************

   Position papers should be about five or six A4 pages long, preferably in
LNCS format and include the author's name, afiliation and contact details.
They should be submited by e-mail as postscript or PDF files before
April 5, 2004, to both organisers.

   LNCS style and guidelines available from:

     http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

*******************
   WORKSHOP FORMAT
*******************

   To establish a first contact, all participants will make a short
presentation of their positions (about five or ten minutes maximum, in
order to save time for discussions during the workshop). Presentations
will be followed by a round of questions and discussion on participants’
positions. From these presentations, a list of open issues in the field
must be identified and grouped. This will make clear which are
participants’ interests and will also serve to establish the goals of
the workshop. Then, participants will be divided into smaller groups
(typically about 4-5 persons each), attending to their interests, each
one related to a topic on software coordination and adaptation. The task
of each group will be to discuss about the assigned topic, to detect
problems and its real causes and to point out solutions. Finally a
plenary session will be held, in which each group will present their
conclusions to the rest of the participants, followed by some
discussion. A dinner bringing together all the participants is planned
as a part of the workshop.

*****************************
   POST-WORKSHOP PUBLICATION
*****************************

   As usual, the ECOOP’2004 Workshop Reader will include a report on this
workshop, written by the organizers, providing a summary of the workshop
with the major issues discussed, and the conclusions drawn from the
discussions.

   Additionally, participants will be invited to submit an extended paper
after the workshop, in which they may describe in length their research
activities in the field, (possibly including also more detailed
technical aspects). Extended papers must take into account the
discussions and conclusions of the workshop, and should try to address
some of the open issues raised. These post-workshop contributions will
be collected as a technical report by the Universities of the
organizers. Depending on the soundness of the contributions, and if
there is enough interest from the participants, the establishment of a
formal review process for the publication of a special issue of a
journal will be considered.

************************
   ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
************************

   Carlos Canal is Associate Professor of Software Engineering at the
University of Málaga (Spain), where he received his M.Sc. and Ph.D.
degrees in Computer Science in 1993 and 2001, respectively. His research
interests deal with Software Architecture, Component-Based Software
Development, and Component Adaptation. In addition to his participation
as a speaker in international conferences on these subjects, his most
significant publications can be found in The Computer Journal, Science
of Computing Programming, Journal of Systems and Software, and IEEE
Transactions on Software Engineering. He has been a frequent attendant
to ECOOP conferences and workshops since 1997, and he participated in
the organization of ECOOP’2002 as Registration Chair.

   Juan Manuel Murillo is Associate Professor at the Computer Science
Department of the University of Extremadura in Spain. He received his
M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1994 (Polytechnic University of Catalonia,
Spain) and his PhD. in Computer Science in 2002 (University of
Extremadura, Spain). His research interests include Object-Oriented
Concurrent Languages, Software Coordination and Adaptation and Aspect
Oriented Software Development. He has attended several ECOOP editions
and ECOOP Workshops from 1997. He participated in the ECOOP’2002
organization as Poster Chair. In addition, he collaborated in the
organization of several conferences such as the 8th Spanish Conference
on High Performance Computing, and the 4th Spanish Conference on Software
Engineering.

   Pascal Poizat is Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department
of the University of Evry Val d'Essonne (France). He received is M.Sc and
Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Nantes (France)
respectively in 1995 and 2000. His research interests deal with
cross-fertilization between Software Engineering and Formal Methods:
Formal Aspects and Components, Architectural Description Languages,
Components Coordination and Code Generation, Symbolic Transitions Systems
and Value Passing Process Algebras. He is in charge of the
"Objects - Components - Models" transversal team of his laboratory.

-- 
Pascal Poizat
LaMI - UMR 8042 du CNRS / Universite d'Evry Val d'Essonne
Tour Evry 2, 523 place des terrasses de l'Agora, 91000 EVRY, France
http://www.lami.univ-evry.fr/~poizat