AGERE 2014 - 4th Int. SIGPLAN Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

The fundamental turn of software into concurrency and distribution is not only a matter of performance, but also of design and abstraction. It calls for programming paradigms that, compared to current mainstream paradigms, would allow us to more naturally think about, design, develop, execute, debug, and profile systems exhibiting different degrees of concurrency, autonomy, decentralization of control, and physical distribution.
AGERE! is an ACM SIGPLAN workshop dedicated to focusing on and developing the research on programming systems, languages and applications based on actors, agents and any related programming paradigm promoting a decentralized mindset in solving problems and in developing systems to implement such solutions.
All stages of software development are considered interesting for the workshop, including requirements, modeling, formalisation, prototyping, design, implementation, tooling, testing, and any other means of producing running software based on actors and agents as first-class abstractions. The scope of the workshop includes aspects that concern both the theory and the practice of design and programming using such paradigms, so as to bring together researchers working on models, languages and technologies, as well as practitioners using such technologies to develop real-world systems and applications.
Topics include (but are not limited to):
Foundations: ideas, concepts, formalization of the computation and programming models for concurrent objects, actors, agents, and decentralized control programming
Programming languages: theory and practice of languages based on actors/concurrent objects/agents (typing, modularity, mechanism for extensibility, reuse, etc)
Libraries, frameworks and middleware platforms based on actors, concurrent objects, agents and high-level paradigms for concurrent/distributed/asynchronous programming
Programming techniques
Actor-based / agent-based programming idioms/li>
Integration with mainstream programming models and languages: theoretical and practical aspects of exploiting actors/agents and related models/technologies with other reference approaches to concurrent/asynchronous programming, such as software transactional memory, data-flow programming and reactive programming
Design principles underlying relevant paradigms and bridging the gap between design and programming
Design patterns for actor/agent based systems
Validation and verification: theory and tools about testing, debugging, profiling, verifying and validating software systems based on such paradigms
Applications: design and development of real-world applications
Teaching: experiences and reflections about using these paradigms in teaching programming (e.g. concurrent, distributed programming- but not only)
The goal of the workshop is to serve as a forum for collecting, discussing, and confronting related research works that typically appear in different communities in the context of (distributed) artificial intelligence, distributed computing, computer programming, language design and software engineering.
The workshop will be organized as a one-day workshop, integrating both:
a part featuring a mini-conference style, like previous editions, reserving some time slots for the presentation and discussion of those accepted contributions that are meant to be published on the formal proceedings on the ACM DL.
a part featuring a brainstorming style, more targeted to solicit the discussion of ideas/challenges/new directions, etc. raised by the set of position/work-in-progress papers submitted to the workshop and selected by the PC.
The workshop welcomes three main kinds of contributions:
Mature contributions: full papers presenting new previously unpublished research in one or more of the topics identified above. They will be published on the ACM Digital Library as an official ACM SIGPLAN publication.
Position papers and work-in-progress contributions: short papers introducing a contribution (an idea, a viewpoint, an argument, work in progress...) which may be in its initial stage and not fully developed but which is worth being presented given its relevance to the AGERE! topics, to trigger discussions and interactions. They will be included in the informal proceedings.
Demos: these contributions should be about a technology/system that will be presented and discussed during the event.