Colloquium Details
Formalizing Reuse in Open, Collaborative Systems
| Author: | Joseph Kiniry California Institute of Technology |
|---|---|
| Date: | March 07, 2002 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
Abstract
The construction of correct complex software is about more than one's choice of language, process, or methodology; issues of communication about reusable assets across communities, large or small, are critical to software engineering in the large. My understanding of development in open, collaborative communities is derived from an analysis, as a member, leader, and user in such communities, of how people and groups conceptualize, learn, grow, and communicate. This analysis leads to new perspectives and a better understanding of how technologies, tools, and theory can be unified in useful, practical, and illuminating ways to help build correct complex software systems.
I have incorporated these theoretical and practical requirements into a new formalism, with a complementary set of tools, that help people build correct software in open, collaborative communities. The formalism was designed with the user in mind, has a loose adaptable semantics that can be adapted different problem domains, and is grounded in the epistemological foundations of knowledge and software reuse in open, collaborative environments.
In this talk I will discuss this formalism, called kind theory, in detail. I will also discuss some of the software engineering tools I have constructed that realize the theory in a variety of practical ways.
Biography
Joseph Kiniry is a Ph.D. candidate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. His research interests include formal methods, foundations of mathematics, software engineering, object-oriented systems and languages, components, distributed systems, knowledge representation, systems modeling, artificial life, and the many different theoretical underpinnings of computing. While a graduate student at Caltech, he has started several technology firms whose focuses have been distributed systems, software engineering with formal methods, and massive multiplayer entertainment. Prior to Caltech he worked as an independent consultant and as a researcher at the Open Software Foundation Research Institute. He also holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Florida State University.