[TYPES/announce] CFP: IWACO 2008

[David.Clarke@cwi.nl]

[UPDATE: Date of workshop finalized.]
 
                         Call For Papers

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

                           at ECOOP 2008

                July 7, 2008, Paphos, Cyprus
             www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/wrigstad/iwaco08

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,
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

* novel applications of aliasing management techniques such as
  ownership types, ownership domains, confined types, region
  types, and uniqueness.

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.

Program Committee

Peter Müller           (Microsoft Research, Chair) 
Kevin Bierhoff         (Carnegie Mellon University) 
John Boyland           (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) 
Werner Dietl           (ETH Zurich) 
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)

Important Dates

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

Organisers

Sophia Drossopoulou    (Imperial College London) 
Dave Clarke            (CWI) 
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 at 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 at microsoft.com) by April 27, 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 at microsoft.com).