Professor Fish

I am visiting  Zinovy Diskin  and  Tom Maibaum at the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University  to get some work going on patterns of bidirectional transformations (BX), which we started at CSXW 2011 , satellite event at GTTSE 2011 . I am not going to say more, though, about BX here. Instead, I would like to make an announcement of the talk at McMaster. Not too much surprisingly, I am going to speak about megamodeling. As it happens or just in time, the  megamodeling paper  by Jean-Marie Favre, Andrei Varanovich, and me has been accepted for MODELS 2012 .  Title : Megamodeling for software technologies Abstract : The term of megamodeling has arisen specifically in the MDE context as referring to a form of modeling at the macroscopic level such that the model elements in megamodels would be models themselves, e.g., metamodels, conformant models, and transformation models. A more general notion of megamodeling ...

I am visiting the Generative Software Development Lab in Waterloo. Specifically, I am visiting and working with  Krzysztof Czarnecki ,  Zinovy Diskin , and  Thiago Tonelli Bartolomei . Today, I was giving a lecture on 101companies and because it was part of Kryysztof's advanced software architecture / quality class, I focused on 101companies' execution and design qualities. This is an area of 101companies, like so many others, which are still under development. Hence, I closed my lecture with a kind  request , which I also open up to others: Request for help : Submit software quality-related feature proposals for 101companies. Each proposal should contain information like the following: a "headline" (<= 66 characters), a "description" (What's is it? How does it make sense for 101companies' HRMS?). Send your requests to gatekeepers@101companies.org. Do you have an implementation handy? Regards, Ralf Slides : [ .pdf ] Title : Design ...

On 14 June, CWI (the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam) organizes the CWI Lectures on Understanding Software . I quote from the website: "The lectures are organized in honor of Paul Klint having been awarded a CWI research fellowship, as well as his 40th anniversary at CWI. The program features internationally renowned speakers, that represent different visions on understanding software. Understanding how to build better software is as important as understanding how existing software can be maintained and improved. The lectures are accessible for software engineering practitioners, software engineering students, business practitioners and academic researchers alike." My years in Amsterdam (1999-2004), at CWI and VU, in the research groups of Paul Klint and Chris Verhoef have profoundly shaped me as a scientist and a software engineer. After all these years, I feel very much honored to deliver a lecture at Paul Klint's distinguished anniver...

Of course, I won't, but perhaps I should! Then, I could turn to lower-hanging fruits in research, which I first need to spot, which I can't though because I am a bit obsessed with API migration (and admittedly some other stuff such as megamodeling ). Sigh! It was around 2004 that I became interested in API migration and I have talked about it here and there ever since. Perhaps I am thinking that talking about a difficult problem of interest helps in discovering the solution of the problem, or at least a sensible path to go. Wishful thinking so far! In theory , the objective of API migration made a lot of sense while I was on the XML team at Microsoft because there are obviously way too many XML APIs. In practice , nothing happened on this front because I didn't understand automated API migration well enough back then. Add to this that API migration is something that is potentially risky for the API provider and the API migrator . So you need to mash up a rocket scientist ...

Preamble : Ever since 1999 +/- 100 years, I have been working (sporadically, intensively) on grammar-based testing. The latest result was our SLE'11 paper on grammar comparison (joint work with Bernd Fischer and Vadim Zaytsev). I have tried previously to compile a comprehensive slide deck on grammar-based testing, also with coverage on this blog , but this was relatively non-ambitious. With the new SLE'11 results at hand and with the firm goal of pushing grammar-based testing more into CS education (in the context of both formal language theory and software language engineering), I have now developed an uber-comprehensive slide deck with awesome illustrations for the kids. If you are reading this post ahead of the lecture, if you are still planning to attend, then you are well advised to bring brains and coffee. You may also bring a body bag, in case you pass out or worse. As it happens, this is "too much stuff" for a regular talk, lecture, or any reasonable format ...

The inevitable has happened. I have committed myself to giving the first major talk on 101companies (not counting the AOSD 2011 tutorial, which described an early view on the universe). This outing talk happens to be at the CS Department at University of Nebraska at Omaha, as I will be visiting Victor Winter the next two weeks. Speaker : Ralf Lämmel (University of Koblenz-Landau) Acknowledgement : Joint work with Jean-Marie Favre, Thomas Schmorleiz, and Andrei Varanovich. Title : Technical space travel for developers, researchers, and educators Abstract : A technical space is a technology and community context in computer science and information technology. For example, the technical space of XMLware deals with data representation in XML, data modeling with XML schema, and data processing with XQuery, XSLT, DOM, and LINQ to XML. Likewise, the technical space of tableware deals with data representation in a relational database, data modeling according to the relational model or the ER...

I had the pleasure to give a talk today on web privacy and P3P at Ecole des Mines de Nantes in the ASCOLA research team by kind invitation of Mario Südholt . The hidden agenda was to promote our empirical research on P3P but we also agreed upfront to attempt a more general discussion of web privacy. So you find little empirical stuff in the early parts of the slide deck. Title: More of a discussion on web privacy Abstract: The presentation begins with observations about the current state of web privacy on the internet today. The presentation continues to set up some challenges for web privacy to be addressed in practice, subject to contributions by CS research. The technical core of the presentation is a language engineer's approach to understanding W3C's P3P language for privacy policies of web-based systems. Discussion during and after the talk is strongly appreciated. Acknowledgement: This is joint work with Ekaterina Pek, ADAPT Team, University of Koblenz-Land...