Call For Papers



   International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership 

             in object-oriented programming (IWACO) 



                           at ECOOP 2008



                July 7 or 8, 2008, Paphos, Cyprus

             www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/wrigstad/iwaco08



The power of objects lies in the flexibility of their

interconnection structure. But this flexibility comes at a cost.

Because an object can be modified via any alias, object-oriented

programs are hard to understand, maintain, and analyse. Aliasing

makes objects depend on their environment in unpredictable ways,

breaking the encapsulation necessary for reliable software components,

making it difficult to reason about and optimise programs, obscuring

the interactions between objects, and introducing security

problems.  



Aliasing is a fundamental difficulty, but we accept its presence.

Instead we seek techniques for describing, reasoning about,

restricting, analysing, and preventing the connections between

objects and/or the interactions between them. Promising

approaches to these problems are based on ownership, confinement,

uniqueness, sharing control, escape analysis, argument

independence, read-only references, effects systems, and access

control mechanisms.



The workshop will generally address the question how to manage

interconnected object structures in the presence of aliasing.  In

particular, we will consider the following issues (among others):



* models, type and other formal systems, programming language

  mechanisms, analysis and design techniques, patterns and

  notations for expressing object ownership, aliasing,

  confinement, uniqueness, and related topics.



* optimisation techniques, analysis algorithms, libraries,

  applications, and novel approaches exploiting object ownership,

  aliasing, confinement, uniqueness, and related topics



* empirical studies of programs or experience reports from

  programming systems designed with these issues in mind



* novel applications of aliasing management techniques such as

  ownership types, ownership domains, confined types, region

  types, and uniqueness.



We encourage not only submissions presenting original research

results, but also papers that attempt to establish links between

different approaches and/or papers that include survey material.

Original research results should be clearly described, and their

usefulness to practitioners outlined. Paper selection will be based on

the quality of the submitted material.



The best papers will appear in a special issue of the IET Software

journal.



Program Committee



Peter Müller           (Microsoft Research, Chair) 

Kevin Bierhoff         (Carnegie Mellon University) 

John Boyland           (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) 

Werner Dietl           (ETH Zurich) 

Manuel Fähndrich       (Microsoft Research) 

Jeff Foster            (University of Maryland, College Park) 

David Naumann          (Stevens Institute of Technology) 

Matthew Parkinson      (University of Cambridge) 

Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter  (University of Kaiserslautern) 

Mooly Sagiv            (Tel-Aviv University) 

Tobias Wrigstad        (Purdue University)



Important Dates



Submission:            April 30, 2008

Notification:          May 26, 2008

Final Version:         June 9, 2008

Workshop:              July 7 or 8, 2008



Organisers



Sophia Drossopoulou    (Imperial College London) 

Dave Clarke            (CWI) 

James Noble            (Victoria University of Wellington) 

Tobias Wrigstad        (Purdue University) 





Participation



The number of participants is limited.  Apart from those with accepted

papers, others may attend by sending an email to Peter Müller

(mueller@microsoft.com) indicating what contribution you could make to

the workshop.  A small number of places will be reserved for PhD

students and other researchers wishing to begin research in this area.





Selection Process



Both full papers (up to 10 pages) and position papers (1-2 pages) are

welcome. All submissions will be reviewed by the programme committee.

The accepted papers, after rework by the authors, will be published in

the Workshop Proceedings, which will be distributed at the

workshop. All accepted submissions shall remain available from the

workshop web page.



Papers should be sent as PDF files to Peter Müller

(mueller@microsoft.com) by April 27, 2008 and be accompanied by a

text-only message containing: title, abstract and keywords, the

authors' full names, and address and e-mail for

correspondence. Submissions should be in English.





Queries



Queries may be directed to Peter Müller (mueller@microsoft.com).