[BDCSG2008] “What” goes around (Joe Hellerstein)

Joe open fires saying “The web is big, a lot of monkeys pushing keys”. Funny. The industrial revolution of data is coming. Large amounts of data are going to be produce. The other revolution is the hardware revolution, leading to the question of how we program such animals to avoid the dead of the hardware industry. The last one, the industrial revolution in software, echoing automatic programming. Declarative programs is great, but how many domains, and which ones can absorb it. Benefits: Rapid prototyping, pocket-size code bases, independent from the runtime, ease of analysis and security, allow optimization and adaptability. But the key question is where is this useful? (besides SQL and spreadsheets). His group has rolled out declarative languages for networking. That includes routing algorithms. other networking stacks, and wireless sensor nets. His approach is a reincarnation of DATALOG. It fits the centrality of the graphs and rendezvous in networks. After this initial issues P2 has been used for consensus (paxos), secure networking, flexible data replications, and mobile networks. Currently other applications being build: compilers, natural language, computer games, security protocols, information extraction, modular robotics. The current challenges they are facing include a sound system design, language facing the usage on real world programing, lack of analysis for the languages, and not turing complete, connections to graph theory and algebraic modeling, efficient models for A*. Another challenge is how you do distributed inference and metacompilation to provide hardware runtimes. The data network uncertainty and P2 can help solve the embedding of the routing information, the network routing informations, and the conceptual networks together, and being able to express them together. Evita Raced is the runtime for P2 (a simple wire data flow bootstrapper). More info here.