International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership in object-oriented programming (IWACO)
July 7, 2009
in conjunction with ECOOP 2009
July 6th – 10th 2009, Genova, Italy
[Note: deadline extended until April 13!]
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 interactions 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/or the interactions between them. Promising approaches to these problems are based on ownership, confinement, separation logic, uniqueness, 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):
- models, type and other formal systems, programming language mechanisms, analysis and design techniques, patterns and notations for expressing object ownership, aliasing, confinement, uniqueness, and related topics;
- optimisation techniques, analysis algorithms, libraries, applications, and novel approaches exploiting object ownership, aliasing, confinement, uniqueness, and related topics;
- empirical studies of programs or experience reports from programming systems designed with these issues in mind;
- programming logics that deal with aliasing, or use ownership, confinement or resourcing;
- applications of aliasing management techniques such as ownership types, ownership domains, confined types, region types, and uniqueness to concurrency or reasoning.
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 13, 2009 (23.59 Apia, Samoa time) |
| Notification: | May 8, 2009 |
| Final Version: | May 22, 2009 |
| Workshop: | July 7, 2009 |
Programme Committee
| Matthew Parkinson | (University of Cambridge, Chair) |
| Kevin Bierhoff | (Carnegie Mellon University) |
| Cristiano Calcagno | (Imperial College) |
| Nicholas Cameron | (Victoria University of Wellington) |
| Christian Haack | (Aicas Realtime, Karlsruhe) |
| Rustan Leino | (Microsoft Research) |
| David Liu | (SUNY Binghamton) |
| Ana Milanova | (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) |
| Aleks Nanevski | (Microsoft Research, Cambridge) |
| Noam Rinetzky | (Queen Mary University) |
| Tian Zhao | (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) |
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 Matthew Parkinson (mjp41@cl.cam.ac.uk) 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 submitted to EasyChair by April 13, 2009 through EasyChair. Submissions should be in English.
Queries
Queries may be directed to Matthew Parkinson (mjp41@cl.cam.ac.uk).