<html><body>Colloquium Speaker <br><a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/sburckha/">Sebastian Burckhardt</a>, from Microsoft Research<br>Thursday, November 20, 2014 - 4:30pm<br>Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)<br><br>Robust Abstractions for Replicated Shared State<br><br>In
the age of cloud-connected mobile devices, users want responsive apps
that read and write shared data everywhere, at all times, even if
network connections are slow or unavailable. Replication and eventual
consistency, while able to deliver this experience, require us to face
the complexity of asynchronous update propagation and conflict
resolution. Our research goal is to find abstractions that encapsulate
this complexity, in order to simplify the programming of distributed
applications that are responsive, reactive, and collaborative.<br><br>In
this talk, we first discuss the general principles of eventual
consistency. Then, we introduce our programming model, consisting of
cloud types (for declarative type-based conflict resolution) and the
GLUT model (an operational consistency model based on a global log of
update transactions). Finally, we report on our practical experiences
with supporting cloud types and GLUT in the TouchDevelop programming
language and mobile development environment.<br><br>Sebastian Burckhardt
was born and raised in Basel, Switzerland, where he studied Mathematics
at the local University. During an exchange year at Brandeis
University, he discovered his affinity to Computer Science and
immigrated to the United States. After a few years of industry
experience at IBM, he returned to academia and earned his PhD in
Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, he has
worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond. His general
research interest is the study of programming models for of concurrent,
parallel, and distributed systems. More specific interests include
consistency models, concurrency testing, self-adjusting computation, and
the concurrent revisions programming model.<br><br></body></html>