Room 204
15 February 2018 - 14h00
Adaptive systems made by self-assembling heterogeneous components within regular 2D patterns
by Gheorghe Stefanescu from University of Bucharest
Abstract: This talk focuses on extensions of regular languages/expressions in 2- and 3-dimensions, with applications to interactive programming and adaptive systems. We start with a new model of adaptive systems, called ``virtual organisms''; then we briefly present Agapia, a structured HPC programming environment here used for getting quick implementations for virtual organisms simulations.
The relation between a structure and the function(s) running on that structure is of central interest in many fields. Our presentation addresses this question with reference to computer science recent hardware/software advances, particularly in areas as IoT, CPS, robotics, self-systems, AI-hardware, etc.
At the modelling, conceptual level, the key ingredient is the introduction of the concept of ``virtual organism'', to populate the intermediary level between rigid, slightly reconfigurable, hardware agents and abstract, intelligent, adaptive software agents. A virtual organism has a structure, resembling the hardware capabilities, and it runs low-level functions, implementing the software requirements. Roughly speaking, it is an adaptive, reconfigurable, distributed, interactive, open system, consisting of a network of heterogeneous computing nodes, with a constrained structural shape, and running a bunch of overlapping functions.
Technically, the virtual organisms presented here are in two dimensions (2D) and their structures are described by regular 2D pattens (including also the time dimension, we get a model using 3D regular patterns). By reconfiguration, an organism may change its structure to another structure belonging to the same 2D pattern. We illustrate the approach briefly describing three simple organisms: (1) a tree collector organism; (2) a feeding cell organism, consisting of a membrane, with collecting/releasing trees attached on its external/internal side; and (3) an organism consisting of a collection of connected feeding cell organisms.
The second part is a brief survey of work on register-voice structured interactive systems (rv-IS model) and on Agapia programming. The rv-IS model is based on space-time duality and is used for modeling, programming and reasoning about structured, open, interactive systems. Agapia, introduced ten years ago, is a structured programming language where dataflow and control flow structures can be freely mixed. Currently, its compiler produces HPC executions, within either MPI or OpenMP environments.
