Research

Projects

• Demeter Project / Adaptive Programming (AP, since 1985)
  Current Projects:
  • AP-F (Functional Adaptive Programming, Bryan Chadwick)
    • DemeterF (AP-F for Java and C#)
    • apf-lib (AP-F for Scheme)
  • Demeter Interfaces
  • AP-P (P = InterPosition, Ahmed Abdelmeged)
• Evergreen Project (since 1975, restarted in 2006)
  • Specker Challenge Game Home Page

Karl Lieberherr, Professor, CCIS. Professor Lieberherr's research focuses on two areas: applied programming languages/software engineering, and Scientific Community Games to support innovation and learning through competition and collaboration. He jointed Northeastern University in 1985 and established the Demeter research group, which developed Adaptive Programming (AP). AP abstracts out traversals from programs, which makes programs both simpler and more powerful. AP helps to control tangling between structure and behavior, and prevents unnecessary duplication of structural information. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP), a generalization of AP that Professor Lieberherr's group developed with Xerox PARC, advises arbitrary code, not just pure traversal code. DemeterF is the latest incarnation of AP using functional programming. DemeterF creates a balance between programming flexibility, traversal adaptability, and safety. DemeterF can be compiled with very minimal user intervention to multi-core architectures for fast execution. While the Demeter project initially focused on good design principles (such as the Law of Demeter) it also takes on the challenge of fast performance of adaptive programs on modern architectures.