Featherweight Musings: February 2011


                          Call For Papers

   International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership
             in object-oriented programming (IWACO)

              Celebrating 20 years of aliasing research
   
                           at ECOOP 2011

                  July 25th, 2011, Lancaster, UK


             http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/Events/IWACO2011/


Call For Papers
===============


2011 is the 20th anniversary of "The Geneva Convention on The Treatment
of Object Aliasing", which started research in aliasing and led to the
development of object-ownership techniques. To celebrate, IWACO 2011
will be a special edition; we are in negotiation to publish a book
(edited by members of the organising committee) containing the best
papers from IWACO '11 and invited papers of a survey or retrospective
nature. In addition to original research papers, we encourage authors to
submit position papers and papers considering future research
directions.

The power of objects lies in the flexibility of their interconnection
structure. But this flexibility comes at a cost. Because an object can
be modified via any alias, object-oriented programs are hard to
understand, maintain, and analyse. Aliasing makes objects depend on
their environment in unpredictable ways, breaking the encapsulation
necessary for reliable software components, making it difficult to
reason about and optimise programs, obscuring the flow of information
between objects, and introducing security problems.

Aliasing is a fundamental difficulty, but we accept its presence.
Instead we seek techniques for describing, reasoning about, restricting,
analysing, and preventing the connections between objects and/or the
flow of information between them. Promising approaches to these problems
are based on ownership, confinement, information flow, sharing control,
escape analysis, argument independence, read-only references, effects
systems, and access control mechanisms.

The workshop will generally address the question how to manage
interconnected object structures in the presence of aliasing. In
particular, we will consider the following issues (among others):

* models, type and other formal systems, programming language
mechanisms, analysis and design techniques, patterns and notations for
expressing object ownership, aliasing, confinement, uniqueness, and/or
information flow.

* optimisation techniques, analysis algorithms, libraries, applications,
and novel approaches exploiting object ownership, aliasing, confinement,
uniqueness, and/or information flow.

* empirical studies of programs or experience reports from programming
systems designed with these issues in mind

* novel applications of aliasing management techniques such as ownership
types, ownership domains, confined types, region types, and uniqueness.

We encourage not only submissions presenting original research results,
but also papers that attempt to establish links between different
approaches and/or papers that include survey material. Original research
results should be clearly described, and their usefulness to
practitioners outlined. Paper selection will be based on the quality of
the submitted material.

The workshop will be held as part of the ECOOP'11 conference taking
place in Lancaster, England.




Programme Committee
-------------------

Nicholas Cameron        (chair, Victoria University of Wellington)
Dave Clarke             (KU Leuven)
Werner Dietl            (University of Washington)
Ioannis Kassios         (ETH Zurich)
Doug Lea                (State University of New York at Oswego)
James Noble             (Victoria University of Wellington)
Matthew Parkinson       (Microsoft Research, Cambridge)
Alex Potanin            (Victoria University of Wellington)
Tobias Wrigstad         (Uppsala University)


Important Dates
---------------

15 April, 2011: paper submission deadline
20 May, 2011: author notification
25 May, 2011: full program disseminated
24 June, 2011: papers available
25 July, 2011: workshop takes place


Organisers
----------

Dave Clarke             (KU Leuven)
James Noble             (Victoria University of Wellington)
Tobias Wrigstad         (Uppsala University)
Peter Muller            (ETH Zurich)
Matthew Parkinson       (Microsoft Research, Cambridge)


Participation
-------------

The number of participants is limited to 25. Apart from those with
accepted papers, others may attend by sending an email to Nicholas
Cameron (ncameron@ecs.vuw.ac.nz) indicating what contribution you could
make to the workshop. A small number of places will be reserved for PhD
students and other researchers wishing to begin research in this area.


Selection Process
-----------------

Both full papers (up to 10 pgs.) and short papers (1-2 pgs.) are
welcome. All submissions will be reviewed by the programme committee.
The accepted papers, after rework by the authors, will be published in
the Workshop Proceedings, which will be distributed at the workshop. All
accepted submissions shall remain available from the workshop web page.

Papers should be submitted via Easychair at

  https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwaco11

by 15 April, 2011. Submissions should be in English.


Queries
-------

Queries may be directed to Nicholas Cameron (ncameron@ecs.vuw.ac.nz).
Featherweight Musings

Thursday, February 24, 2011

IWACO '11 website

IWACO 2011: Call for Papers

Christchurch Earthquake
