Informatics Seminar on Monday, July 7 at 11.30 - Dr. Stefano Zacchiroli
Staff - Faculty of Informatics
Start date: 7 July 2008
End date: 8 July 2008
The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Dr. Stefano Zacchiroli
TITLE: MANaging the COmplexity of the Open Source Infrastructure
SPEAKER: Dr. Stefano Zacchiroli , Université Paris Diderot, France
DATE: Monday, July 7th, 2008
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-006, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 11.30
ABSTRACT:
Free and Open Source Software distributions raise difficult problems both for
distribution editors and system administrators. Distributions evolve rapidly by
integrating new versions of software packages that are independently developed.
System upgrades may proceed on different paths depending on the current state of
a system and the available software packages, and system administrators are
faced with choices of upgrade paths, and possibly with failing upgrades.
In this talk we give an overview of two research project which are addressing
these problems. On one hand the now completed EDOS project has focused on tools
for the distribution editor. We will present its main achievements on the
encoding of good properties that need to enjoyed by distribution repositories,
such as the possibility to install each of the distributed packages. Similar
problems can be encoded as well-known propositional logic problems such as SAT.
Mainstream distributions are nowadays exploiting this encoding and starting to
use SAT solvers to check repository properties.
On the other hand, the just started Mancoosi project aims at developing tools
for the system administrator. The project pursues two main avenues:
(1) develop mechanisms that provide for rollbacks of failed upgrade attempts,
allowing the system administrator to revert the system to the state before
the upgrade;
(2) develop better algorithms and tools to plan upgrade paths based on various
information sources about software packages and on optimization criteria.
In the talk we will give an overview of Mancoosi research directions and of the
current project state.
BIO:
Stefano Zacchiroli is a post-doctorate at Laboratoire PPS, Université Paris
Diderot - Paris 7. He got his PhD in 2006 from the University of Bologna (Italy)
for his work on interactive theorem proving and on the development of Matita, a
proof assistant based on the Calculus of (Co)Inductive Constructions. Since 2001
he has also been an official developer of the Debian GNU/Linux project. His
research interests include: free software and the application of formal methods
to address the complexity challenges posed by software artifacts like GNU/Linux
distributions; type theory, interactive theorem proving, and the role of human
computer interaction in interactive proofs; web technologies, in particular type
systems for XML trees, and wiki-based collaboration technologies. He is
currently a member of the EU-funded Mancoosi <http://www.mancoosi.org> research
project and of the W3C's XML Schema working group.
