When: Monday, June 18, 2007 1:30 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & =
Canada).
Where: 113/3181 Conference Room (Space may be limited)

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

You are invited to attend... please pass on to internal MS employees who ma=
y be interested.
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**************************
WHO:              Prof. Karl Lieberherr
AFFILIATION:    Northeastern University
TITLE:               Structure-Shy Programming Revisited
WHEN:             Mon 6/18/2007
WHERE:           113/3181 Conference Room (Space may be limited)
TIME:                1:30PM-3PM
HOST:              Wolfram Schulte/Ralf Lammel
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***************************

ABSTRACT:
Adaptive Programming (AP), developed as an extension to OO in the 90s, sepa=
rates the concern of where to navigate on objects (WHERE-TO-GO) from the co=
ncern of what to do during the navigation (WHAT-TO-DO). The history-based n=
avigation abstractions provided by AP allow modifications to the underlying=
 object topology without affecting its associated computation. We call such=
 programs structure-shy because they withstand some changes to the underlyi=
ng data-structure.  Structure-shy programming (SSP), in different incarnati=
ons, has recently gained widespread acceptance. The XML community has appli=
ed these ideas to XPath and the Haskell community, through SYB, has studied=
 structure-shyness in the context of a modern statically typed, purely func=
tional, programming language.  In this talk we present four recent developm=
ents in SSP all geared towards making SSP safer and more modular: (1) Demet=
er Interfaces, (2) Functional Visitors, (3) a simpler semantics, called Tar=
get Guarantee Semantics and (4) perobject and pertraversal variables to imp=
rove the expressiveness of visitors. We will discuss the four developments =
and sketch their efficient implementation with applications to C# programmi=
ng and schema-aware XML processing.  Joint work with: Bryan Chadwick, Thera=
pon Skotiniotis and Ahmed Abdelmeged


BIO:
Karl Lieberherr started his research career in computer science as a theore=
tical computer scientist, focusing on the theory of P-optimal algorithms fo=
r the generalized maxiumum satisfiability problem (MAX-CSP), still an activ=
e area of research. He also invented, independently and simultaneously on t=
he other side of the Atlantic, an early form of non-chronological backtrack=
ing based on learned clauses (superresolution) which has become a key featu=
re of most state-of-the-art SAT and CSP solvers. In the mid 1980s, he switc=
hed to his current research area: Object-Oriented and Aspect-Oriented Softw=
are Development and focused on issues of software design and modularity. He=
 founded the Demeter research team, which studied the then-novel idea of Ad=
aptive Programming, also known as structure-shy programming and produced th=
e Law of Demeter ("talk only to your friends": an explicit form of coupling=
 control) and several systems for separating concerns in an object-oriented=
 programming context: Demeter/Flavors, Demeter/C++, DemeterJ, DJ and XAspec=
ts.

Dr. Lieberherr is a Professor in the College of Computer and Information Sc=
ience  at Northeastern University.