Managing the complexity of Open Source Software

Dr. Pietro Abate, Université Paris Diderot / Irill - INRIA, will speak on "Managing the complexity of component based systems" at the Australian National University in Canberra, 3:30pm, 10 January 2012.

Managing the complexity of component based systems

Dr. Pietro Abate (UniversitA Paris Diderot / Irill - INRIA )

COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR

DATE: 2012-01-10
TIME: 15:30:00 - 16:30:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU ...

ABSTRACT:
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are rather peculiar instances of component-based software platforms. They are developed rapidly and without tight central coordination, they are huge (tens to thousands components per platform), and their importance in the Internet computing infrastructure is growing.

Both the construction of a coherent collection of components and the maintenance of installations based on these raise difficult problems for distribution maintainers and system administrators. Distributions evolve rapidly by releasing new component versions and strive for increasingly high Quality Assurance (QA) requirements on their component collections. System upgrades may proceed on different paths depending on the current state of the system and the available components, and system administrators are faced with difficult choices of upgrade paths and with frequent upgrade failures.

The now concluded project MANCOOSI (Managing the Complexity of the Open Source Infrastructure) aims to solve some of these problems. I will describe current and past work done in the context of MANCOOSI and some future directions.
BIO:
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2006 focusing theoretical computer science. During my Ph.D. I developed the Tableau WorkBench, a generic theorem prover that is both easy to use and flexible accepting specification in different formats. The TWB has been used to experiment with a number of modal logics and in particular with fix-point logics.

In the last 5 years I've been involved with two academic research projects, Cduce and Mancoosi founded by European community. Recently I have joined the center for research and innovation on Free Software (irill). I'm a strong supporter of the Debian project (despite I never officially joined it ).

My current academic interests are software engineering, theorem proving, functional programming, modal logic. My focus at the moment is on open source and in particular in relation to quality assurance aspects of software distribution and component based system.