The IIT Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery is proud to host its first distinguished lecture of 2002. Dr. Barrett Bryant, Professor and Associate Chair of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham will be giving a talk about his research in the UniFrame project (abstract below).

The talk will be held at noon, on Thursday, October 24, 2002, in the auditorium of the Stuart Building (Room 104). Free PIZZA will be on hand for all attendees.

More information on Dr. Bryant and his research can be found at:
http://www.acm.org/top/people/bryant.html

UniFrame:
A Unified Approach for the Integration of Distributed Heterogeneous Software Components

A framework is proposed for assembling software systems from distributed heterogeneous components. For the successful deployment of such a software system, it is necessary that its realization not only meets the functional requirements but also non-functional requirements such as Quality of Service (QoS) criteria. The approach described is based on the notions of a meta-component model called the Unified Meta Model (UMM), a generative domain model, and specification of appropriate QoS parameters. A formal specification based on Two-Level Grammar is used to represent these notions in a tightly integrated way so that QoS becomes a part of the generative domain model. A simple case study is described in the context of this framework.

Keywords: Distributed systems, Formal methods, Generative programing, Glue and Wrapper technology, Quality of Service