Second ECOOP WORKSHOP on

MOBILE OBJECT SYSTEMS

(or "Agents on the Move")

Linz, Austria, July 8-9, 1996

Call for Participation

OVERVIEW

A mobile object system is a collection of objects that may move from one execution environment to another, which may be located on another machine with a different hardware and software platform, resuming their computation in this new context.

This workshop deals with design and implementation issues of programming languages and systems for mobile objects.

TOPIC

The recent interest in software agents --software entities operating on behalf of some user over a large-scale and heterogeneous network-- has been a driving factor for the development of a number of new languages and systems, with the most widely publicized effort being the Telescript language (General Magic), but some degree of agent support is present in languages such as Tycoon (Uni Hamburg), Phantom (Trinity College), Safe-Tcl, M0 (University of Geneva), Facile (ECRC), Joule (Agorics), Object REXX (IBM), Obliq (Digital) and Java (SUN), and in system such as MOLE (IVPR, Stuttgart), Ara (Uni Kaiserslautern), Tcl Agents (Dartmouth) and Map (IMAG Grenoble).
The common characteristic of all of these projects is their emphasis on mobile computation and remote programming.

The goal of this workshop is to investigate the requirements of mobile object systems, evaluate how current languages respond to these requirements and chart new research directions.

Mobile object systems address distributed programming from a different angle than remote procedure call (RPC) based distributed systems. Where RPC based systems rely on high-level interfaces to communicate passive data between remote sites, mobile object systems offer a flexible lower level interface for the exchange of active programs. Mobile object system are geared towards distributed computation in very-large, distributed and heterogeneous computer systems where security and performance are key concerns.

This workshop will be a forum for discussing implementation and design issues. A non-exhaustive list of topics include:

AUDIENCE

This workshop brings together researchers working on object-oriented languages and systems that support mobile computation.
The emphasis of the workshop will be on language and system implementation issues rather than on applications of the mobile object technology.
Workshop attendees are expected to take an active part in the discussions. A position paper will be written to summarize the results of the workshop.

HOW TO APPLY

Prospective participants should submit a position paper describing current research in the field (<=10 pages) AND a problem statement outlining a particular problem to discuss at the workshop (1-2 pages). Both should be submitted via e-mail to:
ecoopws@cui.unige.ch
Submissions should survey technology, or describe original research, design and development, and/or implementation. Results should be clear and useful to other practitioners in the field. Description of a new system should include reproducible, useful results or lessons learned. Every paper will get at least three reviews. Final papers will follow the Springer Verlag LNCS format:
(gopher://trick.ntp.springer.de/11/tex/latex/llncs).
Submitted URL's of papers and/or of home pages will be included into the WWW page of the workshop (URL see below). A selection of the best papers will be considered for publication by Springer-Verlag.

FORMAT

The workshop will take place in the two days before the conference. The first day of the workshop will be devoted to presentations of on-going work and of state of the art systems. Discussions of the problem topics submitted by the participants will take place on the second day.

TIMETABLE

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

WORKSHOP URL

        http://cuiwww.unige.ch/~ecoopws/ws96/cfp.html

ORGANIZATION

Jan Vitek
University of Geneva,          Object Systems Group, 
24, rue General-Dufour,        CH-1211 Geneve 4, Switzerland
e-mail: jvitek@cui.unige.ch,   http://cuiwww.unige.ch/~jvitek

Christian Tschudin
Institut f\"ur Informatik,      Universit\"at Z\"urich
Winterthurerstr. 190,           CH - 8057 Z\"urich, Switzerland
e-mail: tschudin@ifi.unizh.ch   tel/fax: (+41'1) 257'4579/363'0035 

Joachim Baumann
Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems (IPVR) 
Breitwiesenstr. 20 - 22, D-70565 Stuttgart, Germany
e-mail: Joachim.Baumann@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
Tel:    +49 711 7816 218   Fax:    +49 711 7816 424