Keynote 1: Spatial Edge Services
Abstract: Ubiquitous and context-aware sensors are increasing in number and aim at providing comfort and better life quality. They are spatially distributed and their computation capacity are still under-exploited. “Spatial Edge Service” are a new generation of services exploiting IoT and spatially distributed data. They result from collective and decentralised interactions of multiple computing entities. They rely on a logic and chemical-based coordination model. Spatial edge services provide innovation capabilities for the software industry, connected objects manufacturers and edge computing industry. This talk discusses Spatial Edge Services, their underlying coordination model, a set of development tools, a series of case studies scenarios and future visions.
Speaker: Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo is the Director of the Centre Universitaire d’Informatique since 2016, an interfaculty research and teaching center of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Giovanna received her Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1999. Her research interests relate to the engineering of decentralised software with self-organising and emergent behaviour. This involves studying natural systems, designing and developing artificial collective systems, and verifying reliability and trustworthiness of those systems. Giovanna co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems (SASO) and the ACM Transactions on Autonomous Adaptive Systems (TAAS), for which she served as EiC from 2005 to 2011.
Keynote 2: Hyperledger Fabric: a Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains
Abstract: Hyperledger Fabric is an open-source system that provides a modular and extensible platform for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains (distributed ledgers). Starting from the premise that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all‘ distributed consensus protocol, Hyperledger Fabric is the first blockchain system to support pluggable consensus protocols which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Hyperledger Fabric also features a radically different architecture compared to its predecessors, with the goals of facilitating blockchain performance, scalability, confidentiality and modularity. Unlike other blockchain systems that require their distributed applications to be written in domain-specific languages, Hyperledger Fabric allows the development of distributed applications/smart-contracts in general-purpose programming languages, without dependency on a specific cryptocurrency. Satisfying these requirements required an overhaul of state-of-the-art permissioned blockchain design and rethinking the way blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion and performance attacks. In this talk we discuss Hyperledger Fabric architecture, detailing the rationale behind various design decisions. We also briefly discuss distributed ledger technology (DLT) use cases to which Hyperledger Fabric is relevant, including financial industry, manufacturing industry (e.g., provenance use cases), supply chain management, government use cases and many more.
Speaker: Dr. Marko Vukolić is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research - Zurich. Previously, he was a faculty at EURECOM and a visiting faculty at ETH Zurich. He received his PhD in distributed systems from EPFL in 2008 and his dipl. ing. degree in telecommunications from University of Belgrade in 2001. His research interests lie in the broad area of distributed systems, including blockchain and distributed ledgers, cloud computing security, distributed storage and fault-tolerance.
Keynote 3: Systematic Testing for Asynchronous Programs
Abstract: Asynchronous programming is a generic term for concurrent programming with co-operative task management and shows up in many different applications. For example, many programming models for the web, smartphone and cloud-backed applications, server applications, and embedded systems implement programming in this style. In all these scenarios, while programs can be very efficient, the manual management of resources and asynchronous procedures can make programming quite difficult. The natural control flow of a task is obscured and the programmer must ensure correct behavior for all possible orderings of external events. Specifically, the global state of the program can change between the time an asynchronous procedure is posted and the time the scheduler picks and runs it. In this talk, I will describe algorithmic analysis techniques for systematic testing of asynchronous programs. I will talk about formal models for asynchronous programs and verification and systematic testing techniques for these models. The results will use connections between asynchronous programs and classical concurrency models such as Petri nets, partial order reductions for asynchronous programs, as well as combinatorial constructions of small test suites with formal guarantees of coverage.
Speaker: Rupak Majumdar is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. His research interests are in the verification and control of cyber-physical systems, software verification and program analysis, logic, and automata theory. Dr. Majumdar received the President’s Gold Medal from IIT, Kanpur, the Leon O. Chua award from UC Berkeley, an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an ERC Synergy award, “Most Influential Paper” awards from PLDI and POPL, and several best paper awards. He received the B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.