Mobile App Expert, Dr. Geoffrey Challen from University at Buffalo, to speak Tuesday, April 28th.
Date:April 28, 2015
Time: 1:00pm
Place: GOL-3455
Speaker: Dr. Geoffrey Challen, University at Buffalo
Topic: Building Less Certain Mobile Apps
Abstract:
While the success of app marketplaces has made it easier to distribute mobile apps, global distribution has made it harder to write mobile apps. To achieve good performance on billions of smartphones worldwide, mobile apps must run efficiently on a wide variety of hardware, cope with constantly changing network conditions, conserve limited energy resources, and deal with varying availability and accuracy of core services such as location, while satisfying a diverse community of users. All of this diversity creates uncertainty for developers, who may be unsure how to adapt their app to achieve good performance for anyone, anywhere.
In this talk I will present our new system, maybe, which addresses the challenge of mobile systems adaptation by allowing programmers to express development-time uncertainty. A new language construct allows programmers to indicate where they are uncertain about what to do, what legitimate options are available, and what constitutes success or failure—all things that can be determined at development time. Post-deployment testing and machine learning are then used to resolve the uncertainty by crafting effective data-driven adaptation strategies once more information is known. Experiences using maybe to introduce uncertainty into the Android platform demonstrate that our system both enables and simplifies adaptation.
Speaker Bio:
Geoffrey Challen leads the blue systems group (blue.cse.buffalo.edu) a shadowy and subversive group of systems designers and hackers located at the University at Buffalo and also directs the PhoneLab Smartphone Platform Testbed (phone-lab.org). blue currently focuses on harnessing the power of the billions of deployed smartphones, which together comprise the largest distributed system ever built. He also teaches a partially-online course on computer operating systems. Somehow, he received both undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, and in a misspent research youth deployed sensor networks on active volcanos.
