Living Computation and Evolvable Software - San Jose
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This meeting, co-hosted by Cisco Systems and SFI, will take place Tuesday, July 18, 2006, beginning at 8:30 a.m., at the Cisco Systems campus in San Jose, CA.
Abstract:
As society at large becomes increasingly dependent on networked computing infrastructures, current software practices are likely to be unsustainable and increasingly risky. Recent advancess in fields such as adaptive systems, evolutionary programming, and theoretical biology suggest that it may be time to reconsider the relationships between computational systems and living systems, and between hardware and software, and to revisit the dream of "automatic programming"---a vision dating back to earliest days of computing---with the goal of automating more aspects of the software development process.
Many issues and research areas bear on evolvable software and living computation, including: automatic code modification, programming languages and techniques to support evolvability, models of computation that are more suited for software evolvability, and larger-scale issues of software ecosystems. For reasons ranging from performance to security, hardware is too hard, but software is too soft---how can we renegotiate the deal? We can imagine many reasons for modifying code, and we are interested in all of them: Fixing bugs, changing requirements, changes in the environment, efficiency improvements, automated software diversity, and increased robustness.