Keynote

Actor-Oriented Programming for the Internet of Things

Professor Gul Agha
Department of Computer Science
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Coordinated Science Laboratory
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract:

The Internet of Things involves networked embedded applications in an open distributed system. Critical requirements of IoT applications include scalability, robustness, real-time responsiveness, energy efficiency and adaptive control. These characteristics are common in biological systems--autonomous agents who symbiotically use model-based data acquisition and feeback control. Individual agents have partial information and coordinate in real-time to create a robust system. The Actor model has been used to build scalable software systems such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook Chat. The Actor model can be extended with probabilistic execution, continuous variables, control and coordination abstractions to facilitate building IoT applications. I will describe these extensions and then discuss how IoT systems with large numbers of actors can be tested and verified for parallel performance and energy behavior using techniques such as Runtime Verification, Statistical Model Checking and Euclidean Modeling Checking.

About the Speaker:

Gul Agha is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-founder of Embedor Technologies, a start-up providing solutions for civil infrastructure monitoring for smart cities. Dr. Agha is best known for his work on the Actor model: his thesis on actors, published by MIT Press, is the most widely cited work on the topic. Dr. Agha has developed a number of novel techniques in the areas of Statistical Model Checking, Euclidean Model Checking, an Energy complexity model for parallel algorithms, software testing and mechanisms for multi-actor coordination. Dr. Agha is a Fellow of the IEEE. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technology (1994-98) and ACM Computing Surveys (1999-2007), and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computing Now.