DAI-List Digest Wednesday, 11 March 1992 Issue Number 73 Topics: Availability of Languages for DAI CFP for International Workshop on Feature Interactions Please send submissions to DAI-List@mcc.com. Send other requests, such as changes in your e-mail address, to DAI-List-Request@mcc.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Mar 92 09:39:41 PST From: gasser@usc.edu (Les Gasser) Subject: DAI Language availability Re: Afzal Ballim's post asking for a DAI language, MACE is no longer available; work on it effectively ceased in the fall of 1989. If you are interested in a concurrent object-oriented language (simulated concurrency) try Jean-Pierre Briot's ACTALK (Actors in Smalltalk) or MAGENTALK (agents built on ACTALK); Jean-Pierre (briot@litp.ibp.fr) is currently recovering from a bad accident, and not reading email, so you can find out more about these two via Jacques Ferber (ferber@laforia.ibp.fr) or Loic Lescaudron (loic@litp.ibp.fr). Jacques has a number of related projects. You might also look into ABCL/1 (I understand it's available via Aki Yonezawa: yonezawa@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp) or Orient-84 and its followups (via Mario Tokoro: mario@mt.cs.keio.ac.jp). You might also contact Sylvain Giroux at U. of Montreal who has done some work extending ACTALK (giroux@iro.umontreal.ca). And I thought the U of Geneva had KNOS etc; have you talked with Tchiritzis' group there? -- Les Gasser Computational Organization Design Lab Institute for Safety and Systems Management USC Los Angeles, CA 90089-0021 USA Voice: 213.740.4046 Fax: 213.740.5943 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Mar 92 17:35:42 EST From: hugo@thumper.bellcore.com (Hugo Velthuijsen) Subject: FI Workshop CFP Call For Participation INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON FEATURE INTERACTIONS IN TELECOMMUNICATION SOFTWARE SYSTEMS St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, December 3-4, 1992 DESCRIPTION This workshop is planned to encourage researchers from a variety of computer science specialties (software engineering, protocol engineering, distributed artificial intelligence, formal techniques, and distributed systems, among others) to apply their techniques to the feature interaction problem that arises in building telecommunication software systems. The feature interaction problem has been a major obstacle to the rapid deployment of new telephone services. Telecommunication software is huge, real-time, and distributed; adding new features to a telecommunication system, like adding new functionalities to any large software system, can be very difficult. Each new feature may interact with many existing features, causing customer annoyance or total system breakdown. Traditionally, interactions were detected and resolved on a feature by feature basis by experts who are knowledgeable on all existing features. As the number of features grows to satisfy diverse needs of customers, managing feature interactions in a single administrative domain is approaching incomprehensible complexity. In a future marketplace where features deployed in the network may be developed by different operating companies and their associated vendors, the traditional approach is no longer feasible. How to detect, resolve, or even prevent the occurrence of feature interactions in an open network becomes an important research issue. The feature interaction problem is not unique to telecommunication software; similar problems are encountered in any long-lived software system that requires frequent changes and additions to its functionality. Techniques in many related areas appear to be applicable to the management of feature interactions. Software methodologies for extensibility and compatibility, for example, could be useful for providing a structured design that can prevent many feature interactions from occurring. Formal specification, verification, and testing techniques, being widely used in protocol engineering and software engineering, contribute a lot to the detection of interactions. Several causes of the problem, such as aliasing, timing, and the distribution of software components, are similar to issues in distributed systems. Cooperative problem solving, a promising approach for resolving interactions at run time, resembles distributed planning and resolution of conflicting subgoals among multiple agents in the area of distributed artificial intelligence. This workshop aims to provide an opportunity for participants to share ideas and experiences in their respective fields, and to apply their expertise to the feature interaction problem. We welcome papers on preventing, detecting, and/or resolving feature interactions using either analytical or structural approaches. Submissions are encouraged in (but are not limited to) the following topic areas: - Classification of feature interactions. - Modeling, reasoning, and testing techniques for detecting feature interactions. - Software platforms and architectures for preventing or resolving feature interactions. - Tools and methodologies for promoting software compatibility and extensibility. - Environments and automated tools for related problems in other software systems. FORMAT We hope to promote a dialogue among researchers in various related areas, as well as the designers and builders of telecommunications software. To this end, the workshop will have sessions for paper presentations, including relatively long discussion periods. Panel discussions and a short tutorial on issues in the feature interaction problem are being organized. ATTENDANCE Workshop attendance will be limited to 75 people. Attendance will be by invitation only. Prospective attendees are asked to submit either a paper (maximum 5000 words) or a single page description of their interests and how they relate to the workshop. About 16--20 of the attendees will be asked to present talks. We will strive for an equal mix of theoretical results and practical experiences. A set of working notes will be provided at the workshop. Papers with the highest quality will be considered for publication in a special issue or section of a research journal. SUBMISSIONS Please send five copies of your full original paper or interest description to: Nancy Griffeth Bellcore, MRE 2L-237 445 South Street Morristown, NJ 07962-1910, USA E-mail: nancyg@thumper.bellcore.com Tel: (201) 829-4538 Fax: (201) 829-5889 IMPORTANT DATES 1 June 1992: Submission of contributions. 1 August 1992: Notification of acceptance. 15 September 1992: Submission of camera-ready versions. WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRPERSONS Nancy Griffeth (Bellcore, USA) Yow-Jian Lin (Bellcore, USA) PROGRAM COMMITTEE chair: Hugo Velthuijsen (PTT, The Netherlands) E. Jane Cameron (Bellcore, USA) Steven Harris (BNR, Canada) Gerard J. Holzmann (AT&T Bell Laboratories, USA) Michael Huhns (MCC, USA) Luigi Logrippo (University of Ottawa, Canada) Harm Mulder (PTT, The Netherlands) Jan-Olof Nordenstam (ELLEMTEL, Sweden) David Notkin (University of Washington, USA) Akihiro Shimizu (NTT, Japan) Yasushi Wakahara (KDD R&D Laboratories, Japan) Pamela Zave (AT&T Bell Laboratories, USA)