[Colloq] College of Computer and Information Science Distinguished Speaker Series - Wednesday, Nov. 10 - Joseph Hellerstein

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science Presents a Distinguished Lecture by:

Joseph M. Hellerstein

Date: Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Time: 12:00pm
Location: 110 West Village H

TITLE:
Disorderly Programming: Experience and Conjectures in Distributed Logic

ABSTRACT:
The rise of multicore processors and cloud computing is putting enormous pressure on the software community to find solutions to the difficulty of parallel and distributed programming. At the same time, there is more—and more varied—interest in data-centric programming languages than at any time in computing history, in part because the inherently unordered nature of these languages encourages programs that parallelize easily. This juxtaposition raises the possibility that the theory of logic programming and deductive database languages can provide a foundation for the next generation of parallel and distributed programming languages.

In this talk I will reflect on my group’s experience over seven years using Datalog extensions to build networking protocols and distributed systems. I will introduce a temporal logic called Dedalus, and our plans to build upon it in our upcoming Bloom language for cloud programming.  Time permitting, I will also discuss a number of theoretical conjectures we have formulated, including the CALM conjecture relating the distributed systems notion of eventual consistency to monotonicity in logic. 

Bio:
Joseph M. Hellerstein is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. He is an ACM Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and the recipient of two ACM-SIGMOD "Test of Time" awards for his research. In 2010, Fortune Magazine included him in their list of 50 smartest people in technology , and MIT's Technology Review magazine included his work on Distributed Programming on their 2010 TR10 list of the 10 technologies "most likely to change our world". Key ideas from his research have been incorporated into commercial and open-source software from IBM, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. He is a past director of Intel Research Berkeley, and currently serves on the technical advisory boards of a number of computing and Internet companies.

Host: Mirek Riedewald