Has the time finally arrived for content-based networking?

Alexander L. Wolf - Imperial College London
July 2nd, 2008

The classical view of networks, particularly what we think of as "The Internet", is undergoing significant change. Fundamental notions, such as the end-to-end principle, are being questioned. Overlay networks, which were originally conceived as convenient virtualizations, are becoming the normal manner in which networked systems and applications are deployed. This changing view of networks is being driven by the evolving nature of today's large-scale communication. Content-based networking, a multicast service in which the traditional network address is replaced with a predicate over message content, met with serious resistance when we first introduced it in 2001, mainly because it was hard to conceive of how it could, indeed should, be deployed at a large scale. But that was before the recent rethinking of the basic network design. This talk examines content-based networking in this new light.

Alexander L. Wolf is a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, UK, where he is Head of the Distributed Software Engineering research section. Prior to that he held the C.V. Schelke Chair in the College of Engineering and was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. And prior to that he was a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Dr. Wolf received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. His interests are in the discovery of principles and development of technologies to support the engineering of large, complex software systems. He has published in a variety of areas, including software engineering, databases, distributed systems, and networking. Dr. Wolf served as Chair of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT). He is currently a member of the ACM Council, the governing body of the 65000-member organization, and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Dr. Wolf serves on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and previously served on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. Dr. Wolf is a Fellow of the ACM and holder of a UK Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award.

Towards trustworthy ICT service infrastructures

Jacques Bus - Head of Unit, - Security (ICT Programme) DG Information Society and Media, European Commission
July 3rd, 2008

The rapid growth and evolution of ICT is creating a globally pervasive environment and a world where end-users are able to exploit services anywhere, anytime and on any device. Every day new, innovative services and service models appear. Many of these new services are dynamically created through customisation and composition of existing ones within integration frameworks which provide their discovery, management and provision.
Future ICT service systems will be at least one level of magnitude more complex and larger than today's ones, more dynamically evolving and necessitating coordination of multiple intervening organisations. Furthermore, the functioning of future software systems will be based on loosely coupled components: groups of different software components that function independently will be assembled dynamically, at run-time, to provide the requested services. The move towards dynamically networked end-to-end services with control spanning across multiple, independent networked domains, affects the predictability and trustworthiness of their execution.
In the future Internet we must have built-in trustworthiness, security and reliability of services and applications delivered to the users. It is therefore essential to consider frameworks and architectures that can handle these functionalities in scalable and dynamically evolving environments.
In such environments we need to address fundamental issues like:

• How to guarantee their security? How should secure software engineering approaches evolve to accommodate both security and dependability in such environments and the ability to assess, enforce and manage the end-to-end runtime system security properties? How to distinguish between legitimate and malicious event triggered service instantiations?
• What about trust architectures, trust models and trusted relations between actors and users intervening in such environments, where event distribution is dynamically spanning several trusted and sometimes un-trusted domains and organisations?
• How to convey the notion of trustworthiness of such environments to the end-users?

These and possibly many others are some of the challenges that will have to be addressed for designing and building future trustworthy and privacy-protecting ICT service infrastructures. Dealing with these challenges, would require bringing together inter-disciplinary research constituencies from computer science (security, dependability and trust, software, services, communications and computing), socio-economic sciences and end users. The FP7-ICT Work programme for 2009-2010, actually under preparation, will provide concrete opportunities for such multi-disciplinary approach.

Jacques Bus studied Mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and obtained his PhD with a thesis in Numerical Mathematics. He worked as a researcher at CWI (Amsterdam) for 15 years. In 1988 he joined the European Commission services in the Unit for Computer Integrated Manufacturing in the Esprit programme. Since then he has been responsible for programme wide operational and organisational affairs in the Esprit and IST programme and for Informatics support in DG Information Society. From June 2000 till March 2004, Jacques was Head of the Unit Software Technologies and Distributed Systems in the IST programme. From March 2004 he has taken responsibilities for the area of Trust and Security in the ICT Programme, which includes Network and Information System Security, Trustworthy Computing and DRM, Biometrics, Identity management and Critical Information Infrastructure Protection. During 2003 and 2004 he was instrumental in the development of the Security Research Programme that started under FP7 in the EU.

Meeting the Challenges of Mission-Critical Distributed Event-Based Systems with QoS-enabled Middleware and Model Driven Engineering

Douglas C. Schmidt - Vanderbilt University
July 4th, 2008

Mission-critical distributed event-based systems are increasingly characterized by many platforms and operators connected through heterogeneous networks.  The networks, operating systems, middleware, and applications that populate these systems must be configured properly to deliver the required quality-of-service (QoS), including low/bounded latency, high scalability, and resilience to malicious attacks and communication failures.  Solutions that rely on conventional SOA technologies do not yet support the QoS requirements of mission-critical systems. This presentation describes how QoS-enabled middleware can meet the performance, scalability, and security requirements of mission-critical distributed event-based systems.  The integration of these capabilities is facilitated by Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) tools that greatly enhance developer productivity and overall system quality, while delivering advanced deployment and evolution capabilities to standards-/COTS-based applications and middleware platforms.  MDE tools shield developers from the complexities of heterogeneous environments and enable them to program QoS-enabled middleware in terms of their design intent, rather than low-level system details.

Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering program at Vanderbilt University.  He has published 9 books and over 400 technical papers that cover a range of research topics, including patterns, optimization techniques, and empirical analyses of software frameworks and domain-specific modeling environments that facilitate the development of distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) middleware and applications running over high-speed networks and embedded system interconnects.  In addition to his academic research and government service, Dr. Schmidt has over fifteen years of experience leading the development of ACE, TAO, CIAO, and CoSMIC, which are widely used, open-source DRE middleware frameworks and model-driven tools that contain a rich set of components and domain-specific languages that implement patterns and product-line architectures for high-performance DRE systems.