We present an approach to pervasive service discovery and selection based on past colocation, mobility prediction and reputation reasoning to try and decrease the amount of service failures.

This seminar will aim to provide an insight on the similarities of Model Driven Architecture and Aspect Oriented Programming and how these similarities could be of benefit to both of these approaches. It will also address a number of well known issues with MDA and present a way of avoiding them.

The problem is how to manage this state of experimental change in a way that can benefit the experimenter. Some results may be more important than others, may require more effort to repeat or may be less affected by certain changes than other sets of results. Managing this environment of experimental change is a complex issue and, to date, has not been fully reconciled.

The autonomous operation of individual resource management systems relied upon in a grid environment requires us to adopt novel scheduling approaches by which these can be made to provide a single integrated service. Principles and mechanisms that allow for coordination between underlying systems whilst still taking into account their potentially divergent behaviour, such as prediction and reputation-based allocation, should be an integral part of the design of grid middleware.

In this talk, I will provide a high-level overview of the grid scheduling problem and define the various requirements for a meta-scheduling framework that we aim to deploy on the eMinerals mini-grid. Looking specifically at est-effort computing resources, I will also provide an overview of the solutions we have looked at to address the various aspects of this problem.

In this talk I will introduce a different technology for tackling the problem of DSL implementation. The Converge programming language which I have developed adds a powerful macro system to a modern dynamically typed language. A simple facility then allows DSLs of arbitrary syntaxes to be embedded within the language and transparently compiled at compile-time along with the rest of the program. Converge offers a number of subtle features which make implementing rich, powerful DSLs easy for the DSL implementer, but which also make life pleasant for the DSLs end users.

In this talk I will introduce Converge itself, show how different types of DSLs can be developed in it, and also offer some more general insights that I and others have gained about DSL development and use. Although Converge is a relatively early stage technology, it has already seen use in industry.

Szumo (Synchronization Units Model) extends an object-oriented language with a notion of synchronization contracts to address these concerns. In lieu of writing low-level code to acquire and release shared objects, programmers declare synchronization contracts in a module's interface. A distributed run-time scheduler negotiates the contracts on behalf of processes, ensuring that the contracts of all modules are met while simultaneously guarding against data races and avoidable deadlocks.

This talk provides an introduction to Szumo and describes a case study to validate the efficacy of Szumo on a realistic design problem: the component-based design of a multi-threaded web server.

This talk suggests that processes are also central to the effective pursuit of essential goals in a broad spectrum of such other domains of human endeavor as medical services, e-government, dispute resolution, manufacturing, business, and even the conduct of scientific research itself. The talk summarizes research in the precise definition of processes in these other domains, using our Little-JIL process definition language as a vehicle for being specific about the processes we have defined and studied in these domains. This vehicle also forms the basis for observations that will be made about the language features, and tools, that seem important in supporting the definition and analysis of processes in all domains.

The first part of the talk will present a goal-oriented requirements elaboration process in action. We will illustrate how to identify and structure goals for a safety-critical system for proton therapy treatments, and how to systematically derive software requirements from such goals. The second part will present ongoing work concerned with automating the derivation of precise specifications of both functional and non-functional software requirements from stakeholders' goals and known domain properties.

Although our results are preliminary, we have been able to develop detailed process models, specify important safety properties, and detect vulnerabilities. This talk describes the technologies we are using, discusses the case studies, and presents our initial observations and findings.