ICEIS 2008: A cloudy Sunday in Barcelona

The morning started with Jean-Marie Favre and his invited speech about “Software languages through the ages”. Quite an eclectic presentation that was quite a bit thought provoking. Some excerpts out of his amalgam of concepts:

• Human kind is defined by language
• Civilization is defined by writing
• Languages expand across a vast period of history, computer science for just a few millimeters in such history line

You may agree or dispute his claims, but you cannot dispute that it was a thought provoking talk. His bottom line, the next research frontier software language engineering and software linguistics. You can find more information at planet-sl.org. Then I run to attend the presentation of paper 263 and 344. I would mention Texas Tech’s SORCER effort and their effort on service-oriented infrastructure to approach programming large-scale networked systems—their approach also take from the get go issues like availability and fault tolerance. Unfortunately I could not finish the presentation because I had to run because it was my turn. The afternoon started with papers 331, 346, and 723. The last one was presenting IBM’s work on modeling life cycles, and their effort of making it a generic model. The last round of papers 87, 614, and 655 where rather eclectics, RDF, RFID tags, and Wikipedia. Quite an interesting combinations. Also the afternoon was crowded with interesting hallway conversations, despite the gray day outside :)