[Colloq] Hiring Talk, Tuesday, Feb. 22 - Eli Tilevich, Georgia Tech

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents:
Eli Tilevich
Georgia Institute of  Technology

Who will speak on:
Enhancing Programs Behind the Scenes

Tuesday, February 22, 2005
11:00am
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:
Common program enhancement tasks include adding capabilities such as 
distribution, persistence, and logging to the core functionality of a 
computer program. Traditionally, program enhancement has entailed having 
to modify the source code of a program explicitly. Our research explores 
an alternative approach that adds new capabilities to existing programs 
transparently, without affecting the maintained version of their source 
code. This presentation will cover two domains of such transparent 
program enhancement: enabling safe distribution of Java programs and 
introducing optimizing transformations in object-oriented programs.

The first domain is concerned with the problem of evolving a centralized 
program into a distributed program using language tools, aiming to 
enable distributed programming with a programming model/semantics that 
closely resembles centralized programming. This presentation will 
describe J-Orchestra, our flagship language tool for distributed 
computing. J-Orchestra (http://www.j-orchestra.org) is an automatic 
partitioning system that takes as input a Java application in bytecode 
format and transforms it into a distributed application, running across 
multiple standard JVMs.

The other domain is concerned with introducing optimizing 
transformations in object-oriented programs without modifying their 
source code by means of binary refactoring, a novel software engineering 
technique. The raison d'être of binary refactoring is not that current 
programs need more optimization but that programmers already apply code 
structure transformations for performance reasons, yet these 
transformations unnecessarily pollute the source code and affect its 
maintainability. With binary refactoring all such transformations can be 
codified and applied through a refactoring browser without affecting the 
application source code.

Biography
Eli Tilevich is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the Georgia 
Institute of Technology working with Dr. Yannis Smaragdakis. He obtained 
a B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Pace University and an M.S. from NYU and 
worked for several years in New York as a software developer. His 
research interests are on the systems/languages end of Software 
Engineering, spanning distributed systems, object-oriented programming, 
and software technology.

Host: Karl Lieberherr