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Open Systems Laboratory at Illinois

Research Theme

The goal of the Illinois Open Systems Laboratory is to develop mechanisms to simplify the development of scalable parallel, distributed and mobile computing systems. Such systems are open to interactions with their environment, must satisfy real-time constraints, and often affect physical processes. The approach of the laboratory is multidisciplinary—is conducted in foundational models of concurrency, programming languages, and middleware.

Research in the laboratory is based on the actor model of concurrent computation. Actors are inherently autonomous computational objects which interact with each other by sending messages. Each actor has a unique name the activity of different actors is potentially parallel. Actor systems are highly dynamic: new actors may be created and names of actors exchanged. The model is very general: processes, sensors and actuators can be modelled as actors.

Over the last decade, research in the group has developed a meta-architectural model for middleware. The model has been formalized and applied to dependable computing and software architecture. Programming abstractions have been developed to represent coordination constraints real-time and requirements. The Actor model has been extended to explicitly model mobility and bounded resources, thus providing a powerful formalism for mobile agents.

Latest Publications

  1. Ashish Vulimiri, Gul A. Agha, Philip Brighten Godfrey, and Karthik Lakshminarayanan. How well can congestion pricing neutralize denial of service attacks?. In SIGMETRICS, 137–150. ACM, 2012.
  2. Samira Tasharofi, Rajesh K. Karmani, Steven Lauterburg, Axel Legay, Darko Marinov, and Gul Agha. TransDPOR: a novel dynamic partial-order reduction technique for testing actor programs. In FMOODS/FORTE, volume 7273 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 219–234. Springer, 2012.
  3. Paria Moinzadeh, Kirill Mechitov, Reza Shiftehfar, Tarek F. Abdelzaher, Gul Agha, and Billie F. Spencer. The time-keeping anomaly of energy-saving sensors: manifestation, solution, and a structural monitoring case study. In SECON, 380–388. IEEE, 2012.
  4. Kirill Mechitov and Gul Agha. Building portable middleware services for heterogeneous cyber-physical systems. In Third International Workshop on Software Engineering for Sensor Network Applications (SESENA'12), pp. 31-36. 2012.
  5. Kirill Mechitov and Gul Agha. An architecture for dynamic service-oriented computing in networked embedded systems. In Software Service and Application Engineering, volume 7365 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 147–164. Springer, 2012.

See the list of all publications for more.