1st International Workshop on Formal Methods for and on the Cloud

Co-located with iFM 2016

The goal of the iFMCloud workshop is to identify and better understand challenges of using formal and semi-formal methods for modeling and verification of Cloud-based systems and computer and communication networks, as well as challenges and opportunities in providing formal analysis and verification as services on the Cloud. We aim to reach these goals by bringing together researchers and practitioners from these, and other related fields.

Keynote

Actors and Meta-Actors: Two-Level for Reasoning about Cloud Infrastructure
Gul Agha (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, http://osl.cs.illinois.edu/)

Abstract
Cloud Computing involves a very large numbers of actors. Actors have to work together to achieve the system goals; coordination protocols describe the interaction patterns to achieve such goals. We will discuss the problem of efficiently implementing large-scale computing on the clouds while achieving security and coordination between large numbers of actors. Coordination protocols impose constraints on the message flow–thus enforcing specific multi-party session types. However, coordination protocols may also provide a vector for Denial of Service attacks as well as for Information Leakage. Moreover, adaptation in cloud computing requires meta-programming and computational reflection. Reasoning about protocols for coordination separately from the application level actor code can be facilitated by a two-level actor semantics. The talk will describe mechanisms for coordination and methods for formally reasoning about them.

Short Bio
Gul Agha is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is in the area of programming models and languages for open distributed and embedded computation. Dr. Agha is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Meritorious Service Award, and the ACM Recognition of Service Award. He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technology (1994-98) and of ACM Computing Surveys (1999-2007). His book on Actors, published by MIT Press, is among the most widely cited works. He has published over 250 research articles and supervised over 30 PhD disertations. He is a co-founder of Embedor Technologies, providing solutions for infrastructure monitoring using sensor networks.

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