When	Wednesday 16th December 2009, 9:00 to 17:30
Where	University of Lausanne / Building Internef / Room 237
Registration	Send an e-mail to Elisabeth.FournierPulfer@unil.ch, with your first name, last name,  function (PhD student, professor, etc.) and university
Organization	Professor Benoît Garbinato, University of Lausanne

Theme

Over the past decade, we observed impressive scientific, technological and experimental advances in the area of wireless ad hoc networks. Although this technology is considered one of the main enablers for future applications, there is today a lack of appropriate middleware abstractions that adequately address the requirement of such challenging environments. Yet, middleware is a critical component when it comes to leverage the development of a wide range of applications for the ad hoc infrastructure. These range from so-called mobile and ubiquitous applications to peer-to-peer applications.

The challenges of building middleware for mobile ad hoc environments, are considerable, because the diversity of infrastructures and application requirements tends to encourage the development of dedicated middleware solutions that are hard to re-use in different contexts. Furthermore, to build successful middleware for mobile ad hoc setting requires complementary expertise in the area of distributed systems, networks, algorithms, programming languages, software engineering, and application development.

This seminar will offer an overview on recent results, and on open problems yet, when it comes to offer middleware support for building mobile ad hoc applications. Students attending this seminar will gain a comprehensive introduction to the main fundamental problems, technologies, and paradigms in this research area. 

Timetable

9:00	Welcome
9:15	Communication Abstractions for Mobile Pervasive Applications Professor Benoît Garbinato, University of Lausanne
10:15	Coffee break
10:30	Communication Abstractions for Mobile Pervasive Applications Professor Benoît Garbinato, University of Lausanne
11:30	Lunch break
12:30	Distributed Event Routing in Publish/Subscribe Systems Professor Roberto Baldoni, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
14:30	Coffee break
14:45	Programming Support for Context-Aware Applications Patrick Eugster, Purdue University
16:45	Panel with the speakers on the question “what middleware support for mobile ad hoc applications?”
17:30	Seminar ends

Talks

Communication Abstractions for Mobile Pervasive Applications


Professor Benoît Garbinato, University of Lausanne

This tutorial focuses on communication support for a class of emerging distributed applications, which are at the same time mobile and ubiquitous. After giving basic definitions of what we mean by ubiquitous or pervasive applications, we will define the notion of context-awareness and show how it can deeply influence the way developers design distributed applications. In particular, we will discuss new challenges developers are facing when devising mobile pervasive applications, both in terms of programming support and in terms of distributed algorithms. In doing so, we will explore how these challenges are being addressed in commercial and experimental middleware platforms.

About the speaker

Benoît Garbinato is Full Professor in computer science at the University of Lausanne, where he leads the Distributed Object Programming Lab. In the nineties, he contributed to the emerging research trend on separation concerns and protocol composition in fault-tolerant distributed systems, as part of his Ph.D. thesis. He then worked in the industry, first for the research lab of UBS in Zurich (Ubilab), where he lead the software engineering group, and later for Sun Microsystems' professional services, as senior software architect. Since his return to the academic world, his research and teaching activities focus on the design and implementation of adequate programming abstractions for emerging distributed architectures, such as pervasive and mobile systems.

Distributed Event Routing in Publish/Subscribe Systems


Professor Roberto Baldoni, University of Rome "La Sapienza"

Distributed event routing has emerged as a key technology for achieving scalable information dissemination. In particular it has been used as preferential communication backbone within publish/subscribe communication system. Its aim is to reduce the network and computational overhead per event diffusion to a set of interested recipients. This tutorial introduces the reader to modern publish/subscribe systems through an overview on current techniques for event dissemination. The approach we follow proposes a decomposition of these architectures in functional layers. We survey current algorithms for event based routing, and possible overlay infrastructures in wired and mobile systems.

About the speaker

Roberto Baldoni is Full Professor of Distributed Systems at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". He is the founder of MIDdleware LABoratory (MIDLAB) and he has been PI of several large national and european research projects. Currently he is the the coordinator person of SM4ALL an EU project designing middleware infrastructures for Networked Embedded Systems and he is the Technical CoDirector of COMIFIN an EU project on the protection of the Financial Infrastructure. Roberto Baldoni is a member of the IFIP WG 10.4 and of the steering committees of ACM DEBS and Autonomics conferences. Finally, he belongs to the Scientific Committee of Sapienza Innovazione where he is Director of the "Joint-Lab on Security Research".

Programming Support for Context-Aware Applications


Professor Patrick Eugster, Purdue University

Programming applications for wireless networks with mobile nodes and ad hoc communication patterns is inherently hard. Context-awareness is a notion introduced to describe a large family of applications enabled by modern wireless networks, and a concept for programming such applications. In this tutorial, we attempt a definition of context and context-awareness, before presenting an overview and classification of platforms for context-aware applications described in literature. We distinguish mainly between different dimensions of context, support levels, and architectural choices. Finally, we identify aspects of existing support with need for improvement.

About the speaker

Patrick Eugster is an Assistant Professor of computer science at Purdue University, where he leads the Distributed Programming Group. His research and teaching interests include distributed systems and programming languages, with particular focus on topics lying in the intersection of these areas. Patrick received a Ph.D. degree from EPFL in 2001, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swedish Research Council (SVR), and a fellowship for advanced researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). He has been awarded two prizes of excellence from EPFL for teaching and research contributions respectively, and is a recipient of the prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.