Welcome to the Demeter seminar Spring 1995:

We will meet this quarter on Tuesday afternoons
from 3-5 in 107 Cullinane Hall. We start on April 25, 1995.

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The plan for the seminar is to discuss research topics related somehow to
adaptive software and to introduce Ph.D. and advanced
master students to research topics in adaptive software and related fields.
The prerequisite for the seminar is COM 3360.

Why adaptive software? It is an important topic in computer science
and one which was developed at NORTHEASTERN. We are in a unique position
to contribute to this area since we know it so well.
There is a lot of work to be done in this area of adaptable and
adaptive software.

For work on adaptable software, see URL

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/adaptable-systems

maintained by Crista in collaboration with Xerox, IBM, Icon Computing
and a Swedish university.

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APRIL 25, 1995
Walter Huersch
Linda Keszenheimer
Title: Automating change management of OO systems

Walter and Linda have jointly developed a new kind of adaptive software
motivated by their work on evolution of object-oriented systems.
This work will be in both of their Ph.D. thesis with many additional
results which are their own individual work. 

ABSTRACT:

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A formal framework is presented for maintaining behavior and consistency of
object-oriented systems during software evolution.  The framework
effectively couples a change avoidance approach based on adaptive software
with a change management mechanism to fully automate evolution. Class
structure transformations may render existing objects and programs
inconsistent. The paper identifies the introduced inconsistencies and
provides the necessary object and program transformations to reinstate
consistency while maintaining the behavior of the system. To prove
behavioral equivalency of adaptive programs, the paper defines a formal
semantics for adaptive software and describes a proof system for the
semantics. Finally, the feasability of the framework is demonstrated for
a representative set of primitive class structure transformations.

MAY 2, 1995
Walter Huersch
Linda Keszenheimer

continued
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MAY 9, 1995
Walter Huersch
Title: Meta Object Protocols

With Crista working on integrating MOPs and adaptive programming
over the summer at Xerox PARC, we have to learn about MOPs.
Since Walter uses MOP's in his thesis, he will give us an
introduction and will show some of his results he gets with MOPs.

MAY 16, 1995
Cristina Lopes
Combining adaptive software with MOPS:
  Open problems for the project at Xerox

May 30, 1995
Karl Lieberherr
Title: Open problems in adaptive software

The concept of adaptive software has been refined significantly in
recent years. The Ph.D. thesis of Cun Xiao has laid the
theoretical foundation and the Demeter System/C++ contains many
of the algorithms developed in the thesis. The theses of Ignacio Silva-Lepe,
Paul Bergstein and Ian Holland all contribute additional knowledge
to adaptive software.

Based on this thesis work and the related journal and conference
publications, I will give a survey of open problems in adaptive software.


Future presentations:

Yang Liu: Succinct subgraph specifications: a review of the literature

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World-Wide Web: 
At URL:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/
is the latest information about the Demeter project.
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