ICSOC 2013 Keynotes

Prof. Carlo Ghezzi

President of Informatics Europe and Professor, Politecnico di Milano

Carlo Ghezzi is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, a member of the Italian Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award. He is the current President of Informatics Europe. He has been a member of the program committee of flagship conferences in the software engineering field, such as the ICSE and ESEC/FSE, for which he also served as Program and General Chair. He was also General Co-Chair of the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing. Ghezzi has been the Editor in Chief of the ACM Trans. on Software Engineering and Methodology and is currently an Associate Editor of the Communications of the ACM, IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, Science of Computer Programming, Computing, and Service Oriented Computing and Applications. Ghezzi's research has been mostly focusing on different aspects of software engineering. He co-authored over 200 papers and 8 books. He coordinated several national and international research projects. He is currently the PI of the ERC Advanced Grant SMScom.

Surviving in a world of change: Towards evolvable and self-adaptive service-oriented systems (click for slides)

Change is endemic and continuously affects software systems. Requirements change because business opportunities evolve over time. The environment in which the software system is embedded also changes. These changes may disrupt system functionalities and may lead to failures. Moreover, they may adversely affect important non-functional properties, such as performance, reliability, costs, or power consumption, upon which service-level agreements may depend. An additional problem is that changes to the software must be applied while the software is running, without discontinuing service. A possible solution to these problems may come from self-adaptive software, that is software that can recognize changes and self-adapt its behavior to new operational conditions.

The talk focuses on self-adaptation in the context of service-oriented systems. It discusses the research advances in the field, their potential for practical application, and the main challenges that motivate further research.

Dr. Richard Hull

Research Staff Member and Manager, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY USA

Data-centricity is the Backbone of Next-Gen Business Processes and Services

Services-oriented computing has been evolving, from its roots in orchestration and choreography to the explosion in usage based on the pragmatism of open REST APIs. Strong notions of "type" have been dropped in favor of message-based API's that refer to data objects with flexible and possibly nested structure. However, as we embrace a world of rich and rapidly created combinations of SaaS-based services from a huge scale of third-party sources, we face challenges of entity mismatch, ontology mismatch, and correlation confusion. And underlying these are the inter-related challenges of finding systematic design methods for large-scale compositions, and of enabling formal reasoning about service combinations as an aid to validating their correctness. As illustrated through examples from supply chain management, education, collaborative decision processes, and social media listening, a datacentric perspective on modern service combinations can substantially help in understanding and overcoming the above challenges. Techniques from entity resolution and ontology mappings are already central to addressing challenges in entity and ontology mismatch, although now the importance of application-specific (pseudo-)standards has become paramount. But the entities referred to and manipulated by services are often dynamic, and so additional capabilities are needed. The notion of Business Artifacts can provide a systematic framework for addressing the changing nature of entities. This includes, for example, providing a robust and detailed accounting of "correlation" as originally described in the orchestration and choreography standard, even as new entities emerge through transformations of existing ones. It also provides the basis for a new generation of formal verification tools, which support reasoning about temporal properties of entities as they progress through a combination of services.

This talk provides a framework for applying data-centric techniques in serviceoriented computing; describes key results, techniques, and standards in the area; and identifies fundamental questions that are yet to be resolved.