Computer Science at Yale

Abstract: Internet today provides a wide range of services associated with web sites; examples include getting a stock quote, making an airline reservation, compressing a file or inverting a matrix. Each service may be likened to a basic operation in a computer, the internet computer. An application is a program written over the basic services, i.e., an orchestration of the services. This research is directed toward designing, implementing and studying an appropriate model of orchestration that would allow us to develop wide-area applications succinctly.

Just as structured programming gave programmers effective tools to organize the control flow of sequential programs, our research introduces mechanisms to organize the communication, synchronization and coordination in programs that run on wide-area networks. We have developed a programming model, called Orc, for structured wide-area programming. Orc includes constructs to orchestrate the concurrent invocation of services to achieve a goal -- while managing time-outs, priorities, and failure of sites or communication. The talk will give an introduction to Orc, and some of the ongoing research on enhancing the model.

The Orc web page is at http://orc.csres.utexas.edu

Bio: Jayadev Misra is a professor and holder of the Schlumberger Centennial chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Misra is a fellow of ACM and IEEE; he held the Guggenheim fellowship during 1988-1989. He was the Strachey lecturer at Oxford University in 1996, and held the Belgian FNRS International Chair of Computer Science in 1990.

Misra's research interests are in the area of concurrent programming, with emphasis on rigorous methods to improve the programming process. He has recently developed a programming language, called "Orc", for concurrent orchestrations of interacting components. He is also spear-heading an effort, jointly with Tony Hoare, to automate large-scale program verification.

He has been the past editor of several journals including: Computing Surveys, Journal of the ACM, Information Processing Letters and the Formal Aspects of Computing. He is the author of two books, "Parallel Program Design: A Foundation", Addison-Wesley, 1988, co-authored with Mani Chandy, and "A Discipline of Multiprogramming", Springer-Verlag, 2001.