Tuesday, 28 October

Wednesday, 29 October

Thursday, 30 October

Free Culture: The limited but essential role of property in building an environment for creativity Tuesday, 28 October – 8:30-10:00 Larry Lessig, Stanford University, lessig@pobox.com

This talk will sketch the boundaries of protection that intellectual property law should set, but argue that extremism has now defeated these limits. The consequence is an environment within which modular creativity is increasingly constrained.

Presenter

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He is one of the country's leading commentators on legal aspects of new communications technologies and cyberspace. He is Professor of Law and founder and executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, law and high technology, Internet regulation, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace.

Grid-supported Communications Applications Tuesday, 28 October – 13:30-15:00 Gerald Labedz, Motorola Labs, labedz1@motorola.com

This invited talk will describe how emerging distributed computing systems could mutate into the communications systems of the future. Armed with high speed interconnect, and software elements that assign, track and charge for geographically distributed computing resources, these systems could just as easily compute and deliver an image to a remote location (for human communications) as perform an internal streaming file transfer. With this kind of capability not tied to the user's premises, customer equipment could be very asset light and still deliver very high end services like realtime processed video. Using as an example MIRAGE II, a data mining system with a geographically distributed, remotely computed Augmented Reality interface, a prototype built by Motorola in association with NCSA, Labedz will discuss the main hurdles along the way to communications systems dependent on real-time remote computing and high speed networks.

Speaker

Gerry Labedz has worked at Motorola for 28 years in the areas of mobile and cellular radio hardware and software. He worked on the first microprocessor controlled radio in the '70s, the first digital cellular system in the '80s, and the world's most accurate parallel-computed cellular system simulation tool in the '90s. He holds 23 patents in the areas of radio signaling, system design and visualization, and large-scale real-time simulation for cellular system control. During the 1990s, he and his group were the largest industrial users of the supercomputer facilities at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He holds the title of Dan Noble Fellow, Motorola's highest technical honor. Most recently he has led a project centering on Hyperfast Computational Communications, or HyperComputiCations

Seven Paradoxes of Object-Oriented Programming Languages Wednesday, 29 October – 8:30-10:00 David Ungar, Sun Microsystems

Although many of us have worked to create good object-oriented programming languages, it would be hard to say (with a straight face) that any of our creations have totally succeeded. Why not? I believe that this endeavor is essentially paradoxical. Thus, whenever a language designer pursues a particular goal and loses sight of the lurking paradox, the outcome is an all too often fatally flawed result. One way to think about this is to explore the following seven paradoxes:

1. Because programming languages, development environments, and execution engines are intended for both people and computers, they must both humanize and dehumanize us.
2. Adding a richer set of concepts to a programming language impoverishes its universe of discourse.
3. Putting a language's cognitive center in a more dynamic place reduces the verbiage needed to accomplish a task, even though less information can be mechanically deduced about the program.
4. The most concrete notions are the most abstract, and pursuing comfort or correctness with precision leads to fuzziness.
5. Although a language, environment, and execution engine are designed for the users' minds, the experience of use will alter the users' minds.
6. Object-oriented programming has its roots in modeling and reuse, yet these notions do not coincide and even conflict with each other.
7. A language designed to give programmers what they want may initially succeed but create pernicious problems as it catches on. However, a language designed to give programmers what they really need may never catch fire at all.

Many of these assertions seem nonsensical, misguided, or just plain wrong. Yet, a deeper understanding of these paradoxes can point the way to better designs for object-oriented programming languages.

OOPSLA Keynote - The Internet Paradigm Shift Thursday, 30 October – 8:30-10:00 Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly and Associates, tim@oreilly.com

The computer industry has gone through a sea change in the past few years. The killer applications of the web era turned out not to be PC-based software packages like the web browser, but web hosted applications like google, mapquest and amazon.com. These applications are built on top of Linux and Apache, yet they are themselves fiercely proprietary. But what would most developers do with their source code? These massive systems are valuable for their data as much as for their programs. And by opening up XML web services APIs to that data, the most innovative of these sites are creating new opportunities for hackers to re-use that data and "scratch their own itch." What's more, as constantly updated services, these applications operate on very different timelines and processes than conventional software development. One of the greatest challenges for developers in the next few years is to understand and adapt to the paradigm shift implicit in network computing, and to shed the legacy thinking of the desktop era.

Speaker

Tim O'Reilly is founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to publishing pioneering books like Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century), O'Reilly has also been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web.

Tim has been an activist for internet standards and for Open Source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key internet technologies, helping to block Microsoft's 1996 limits on TCP/IP in NT Workstation, organizing the "summit" of key free software leaders where the term "Open Source" was first widely agreed upon, and, most recently, organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents. Tim received Infoworld's Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his advocacy on behalf of the Open Source community.

Eclipse and The Dark Side of the Moon Thursday, 30 October – 13:30-15:00 Erich Gamma, IBM

Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) is an open source universal tool platform for anything and nothing in particular. This talk looks at Eclipse inside the corona.

Speaker

Erich Gamma leads the Eclipse Java Development tools project and is a member of the Eclipse project management committee. He is also a member of the Gang of Four, which is known for their book: Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Erich has paired with Kent Beck to develop JUnit, a popular testing tool for Java. Before joining OTI he was working at Taligent on a never shipped C++ development environment. Erich started with object-oriented programming over 20 years ago as a the co-author of ET++ one of the first large scale C++ application frameworks.