Panels

Panels are the town hall of OOPSLA--a time to come together as a community and glimse the future of our industry. Join expert panelists as they share their perspectives while being queried, questioned and challenged by one another and the audience. This year's line up includes two panels that will engage experts in healthy debate over competing approaches to the hot topics of Domain Specific Languages and Web Architecture. Two more panels will address challenges of our time which lack comprehensive solutions, but demand serious attention. One of these panels takes on the related problems of Security and Privacy, while the other addresses the need to recruit more women in industry, academia and research. "Escaped from the Lab" tackles the obstacles to Innovation encountered when nurturing an idea into a software-based product. And we'll peer from the edge of today's largest systems into the future with a visionary discussion of Ultra Large Scale Systems.

Escaped from the Lab: Innovation Practices in Large Organizations

Abstract

What are the effective practices for taking new ideas and innovating them into products based on software while avoiding the challenge of under-delivering on too high expectations? Often, the feasibility of The Grand project is assumed based on scope/scale-limited tech trials. Feasibility is further constrained by market pressure on both schedule and resources resulting in costly projects that linger on and never deliver. Panelists will discuss how invention translates into innovation and product while mitigating the risks of software development, the conflicts of organizations and the lure of market opportunity.

DSLs: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Abstract

A resurging interest in domain-specific languages (DSLs) has identified the benefits to be realized from customized languages that provide a high-level of abstraction for specifying a problem concept in a particular domain. Although there has been much success reported by industry practitioners and academic researchers, there is much more work that is needed to enable further adoption of DSLs.

The goal of this panel is to separate the hype from the true advantages that DSLs provide. The panel discussion will offer insight into the nature of DSL design, implementation, and application and summarize the collective experience of the panel in successful deployment of DSLs. As a counterpoint to the current benefits of DSLs, the panel will provide a fair and balanced assessment of the current state of the art of DSLs by pointing to the existing limitations and future work that is needed to take the concept of DSLs to further heights.

The assembled panelists are experts in the research and practice of DSLs and represent diverse views and backgrounds. The panel is made up of industrial researchers, commercial tool vendors, and academic researchers. The panelists have different perspectives on the technical concerns of DSLs; for example, half of the panelists are proponents of textual DSLs and the other half of the panel has experience in graphical notations representing visual languages.

From Sorceress to Scientist: Women in Computing

Abstract

From the first ENIAC programmers, to Susan Decker, the President of Yahoo, women have played an important role in computing. In the area of OO Design and Development, there have been several female pioneers. Yet, the percentage of women who attended OOPSLA last year hovered at 10%, and the number of women receiving undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and related fields, continues to fall from its peak in the mid-1980s. The current estimate is 20%. OOPSLA leadership has promoted strong female representation, yet it suffers from the same unbalanced fate as the rest of the industry.

Successful companies, like Google, realize the importance of a gender-balanced work force, and work hard to recruit and retain women. This panel will hear from several successful women and men in the field of Computing, who will share their ideas on how to recruit women in academia and industry. We will learn more about successful strategies and how they can be applied.

Collaboration and Communication: Growing and Sustaining Ultra Large Scale (ULS) Systems

Abstract

Mission- and life-critical Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) systems are increasingly prevalent and networked in many domains, including business, aviation, communication, defense, finance, health, and public utilities. Such systems are often too complex for generally centralized methods to work well for such tasks as requirements discovery, development, system integration, test, deployment, configuration, operation protection, and evolution. Yet today we lack sound methods and technologies for distributing these tasks across large ecosystems of system production. What technical, legal, contractual, and cultural frameworks are needed to enable global partners with independent, sometimes conflicting agendas, to function effectively in the execution of such tasks? Can a competitive and collaborative distributed design ecosystem deliver value and robustness over time consistent with demands for quality, intellectual property protection, and other such requirements? Join this panel of industry experts and academic researchers who will share and debate their perspectives and lay out a vision for the future.

Privacy and Security: What are you Doing to Keep the Community Safe?

Abstract

In a networked "always on" world, robust corporate and personal security and privacy strategies are increasingly necessary to ensure that the unintended consequences of implementations do not spin impossibly "out-of-control". How do systems and by extension their designers, implementers, owners and users balance the desire for an open world community with the issues of individual privacy and community safety? What questions should business people, scientists, engineers, and researchers ask and what strategies should they consider as they discover requirements, develop systems, and deploy products? Issues from data misuse and encryption strategies to social engineering and meeting the challenge of identify theft (are you really "you"?) are no longer ignorable.