Colloquium Speaker

Speaker:		Amy Murphy Washington University, St. Louis
Topic:		Toward the Rapid Development of Dependable Mobile Applications
Date:		Thursday, April 13, 2000
Time:		11:00 AM
Place:		Gould-Simpson, Room 701

ABSTRACT

Recent technological trends in the miniaturization of computing devices and the availability of inexpensive wireless communication have led to an expansion of effort in mobile computing. The issues of mobility have been approached from a wide variety of perspectives. My own research has spanned algorithm development, formal modeling, and middleware. This talk focuses on the middleware perspective and its important role in the development of mobile applications. Middleware has the unique ability to hide from the application programmer many of the inherent low-level complexities of the mobile environment while, at the same time, exposing key features of mobility through useful abstractions within the confines of a known language. This talk highlights fundamental research issues in mobility and demonstrates how they have shaped the design and implementation of a Linda-based coordination system called Lime. Lime is designed to assist in the rapid development of dependable mobile applications in both wired and ad hoc networks. It offers a common set of abstractions for both physical and logical mobile components. Lime introduces the new concept of transiently shared tuple spaces and leverages off the simplicity of Linda to describe a clear model for interactions. Other novel features of Lime include context dependent accessibility of data, location based information retrieval, and reaction to state changes with both strong and weak atomicity guarantees.