Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series--Abstractions, Models and Tools for Scalable Systems: Progress and Open Problems

The growth of mobile and cloud computing, cyberphysical systems and the internet of things has arguably made scalable ("Big Data") concurrency the dominant form of computing. Agha will describe the state of the art in models of concurrency, programming abstractions and analysis tools. He will then summarize how actor languages and frameworks have been widely adopted to address scalability, and how new analysis tools are facilitating software safety. However, as we scale up, a key limitation of current languages and tools becomes apparent: the difficulty of representing quantitative and probabilistic properties and reasoning about them. He will conclude by discussing problems that need to be addressed to simplify building robust scalable concurrent applications.

About the Speaker

Gul Agha is professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is in the area of programming models and languages for open distributed and embedded computation. Agha is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Meritorious Service Award and the ACM Recognition of Service Award. He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technology (1994-98) and of ACM Computing Surveys (1999-2007) and is the incoming Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Computing Now. His book on actors, published by MIT Press, is among the most widely cited works. He has published over 175 research articles and supervised 29 Ph.D. dissertations. He is a co-founder of Embedor Technologies, providing solutions for infrastructure monitoring using sensor networks.

Event Topic

Distinguished Lecture Series