International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership in object-oriented programming (IWACO)

July 7, 2008

in conjunction with ECOOP 2008

July 7th – 11th 2008, Paphos, Cyprus


Purpose

The power of objects lies in the flexibility of their interconnection structure. But this flexibility comes at a cost. Because an object can be modified via any alias, object-oriented programs are hard to understand, maintain, and analyse. Aliasing makes objects depend on their environment in unpredictable ways, breaking the encapsulation necessary for reliable software components, making it difficult to reason about and optimise programs, obscuring the interaction between objects, and introducing security problems.

Aliasing is a fundamental difficulty, but we accept its presence. Instead we seek techniques for describing, reasoning about, restricting, analysing, and preventing the connections between objects and their interaction. Promising approaches to these problems are based on ownership, confinement, interactions between objects, sharing control, escape analysis, argument independence, read-only references, effects systems, and access control mechanisms.

The workshop will generally address the question how to manage interconnected object structures in the presence of aliasing. In particular, we will consider the following issues (among others):

We encourage not only submissions presenting original research results, but also papers that attempt to establish links between different approaches and/or papers that include survey material. Original research results should be clearly described, and their usefulness to practitioners outlined. Paper selection will be based on the quality of the submitted material.

The best papers will appear in a special issue of the IET Software journal.

Important Dates

Submission: April 30, 2008
Notification: May 26, 2008
Final Version:June 9, 2008
Workshop: July 7, 2008

Accepted Papers

Programme Committee

Peter Müller(Microsoft Research, Chair)
Kevin Bierhoff(Carnegie Mellon University)
John Boyland(University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Werner Dietl(ETH Zürich)
Manuel Fähndrich(Microsoft Research)
Jeff Foster(University of Maryland, College Park)
David Naumann(Stevens Institute of Technology)
Matthew Parkinson(University of Cambridge)
Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter(University of Kaiserslautern)
Mooly Sagiv(Tel-Aviv University)
Tobias Wrigstad(Purdue University)

Organisers

Dave Clarke(CWI)
Sophia Drossopoulou(Imperial College)
James Noble(Victoria University of Wellington)
Tobias Wrigstad(Purdue University)

Participation

The number of participants is limited. Apart from those with accepted papers, others may attend by sending an email to Peter Müller (mueller@microsoft.com) indicating what contribution you could make to the workshop. A small number of places will be reserved for PhD students and other researchers wishing to begin research in this area.

Selection Process

Both full papers (up to 10 pages) and position papers (1-2 pages) are welcome. All submissions will be reviewed by the programme committee. The accepted papers, after rework by the authors, will be published in the Workshop Proceedings, which will be distributed at the workshop. All accepted submissions shall remain available from the workshop web page.

Papers should be sent as PDF files to Peter Müller (mueller@microsoft.com) by April 30, 2008 and be accompanied by a text-only message containing: title, abstract and keywords, the authors' full names, and address and e-mail for correspondence. Submissions should be in English.

Queries

Queries may be directed to Peter Müller (mueller@microsoft.com).


Old IWACO websites

IWACO 2003    IWACO 2007