BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk// X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:A Population Approach to System Design - Matthew Chalmers\, Glasgo w University DTSTART:20120301T103000Z DTEND:20120301T113000Z UID:TALK36702@talks.cam.ac.uk CONTACT:Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins DESCRIPTION:This talk will present a radically new approach to a core conc ept in computer science\, the software class. Traditionally\, programs are made by programmers and then other people—users—just use them. Establ ished methods for software definition\, design and analysis are based on a n exact match between the class as defined by the original program code\, and the instances of that program that users have. These methods are stret ched to breaking point by the current trend toward user-driven adaptation\ , via technologies such as plug-ins (a.k.a. extensions\, add-ins and add-o ns) and in-app purchasing. Adding and removing software modules without te chnical support or supervision is becoming the norm for everyday applicati ons such as web browsers\, image editors and email tools\, e.g. Firefox\, Photoshop and Outlook. Firefox’s developer blog reported in 2009 that 1/ 3 of its users (est. 350 million) had extended it with at least one module \, chosen from several thousands of modules. A practical issue\, therefore \, is that one would be hard put to define a single software structure tha t accurately describes what a program like Firefox is. Use is similarly ha rd to pin down\, as individuals reflect on how they and others use their s ystems—appropriating systems to fit with their own uses and contexts\, a nd sharing their innovations with others. In such ways\, communities of us ers and developers are continually changing applications’ modules\, modu le configurations and patterns of use. As a result\, analysts and evaluato rs are restricted to studying deployments simple enough to avoid the very features that characterise computation ‘in the wild’. Developers are c onfined to work on small parts of a larger system they can’t represent o r understand. Users are largely left to fend for themselves\, with communi ty knowledge to draw from but little in terms of tools and infrastructures to help avoid the ‘plug-in hell’ of incompatible dependencies\, funct ions and uses.\n\nA new five-year £4M EPSRC-funded project is just starti ng up\, led by Glasgow with UCL as academic partner and Edinburgh Festival s\, Rangers FC (and other professional football clubs) and Glasgow Museums as collaborators. It will advance a 'population approach' in which a prog ram is seen as a varied population of software structures\, evolving in th e real world of use\, rather than there being a single structural definiti on—a class—that is replicated uniformly worldwide. The key idea is a n ew treatment of class as dynamic\, stochastic and coupled with programs in use. Rather as biologists analyse DNA and other observed features to defi ne biological species\, we will statistically abstract over patterns of co nsistency and family resemblance among such software populations. Our appr oach turns deployment scale\, and user–driven variety and dynamism\, fro m problems into resources for new design and analysis methods\, synergisti cally set within a novel form of socio-technical design process. We will d evelop new tools and infrastructure that use this representation to feed b ack into the activity of users\, evaluators and programmers. We will use r eal world deployments of mobile and ‘ubiquitous’ applications\, involv ing tens of thousands of users\, to explore aspects of user experience\, s ystem design and theory in a holistic yet manageable way. Our vision is so ftware design\, theory and tools reinvented\, based on stochastic abstract ions that reflect real world populations of software in use. Our objective is to establish this new science of software structures\, and so tackle t he complex problem of how to design to support change and appropriation.\n \nThe University of Glasgow\, charity number SC004401\n\nhttp://www.dcs.gl a.ac.uk/~matthew\n\n LOCATION:Small lecture theatre\, Microsoft Research Ltd\, 7 J J Thomson Av enue (Off Madingley Road)\, Cambridge END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR