Title: Model Driven Middleware for Component-based Distributed Systems
Abstract:
Despite advances in software technologies, key challenges must be addressed before COTS component middleware can be used to build mission-critical distributed applications effectively and productively. For example, developers of distributed applications continue to use ad hoc means to select and compose middleware due to the lack of formally analyzable and verifiable building block components. This talk will describe how Model Driven Middleware (MDM) can be used to specify, analyze, optimize, synthesize, validate, and deploy standards-compliant middleware that is customized for the needs of next-generation distributed applications. MDM is an emerging paradigm that integrates model-based software techniques with component middleware to help increase confidence in the flexibility and assurability of distributed applications.
John A. Zachman
Title: Enterprise Architecture in the New Millennium
Abstract:
Substantive advances in the state-of-the-art for technology implementation continue to validate the fundamental architectural concepts that have been evident for literally thousands of years! In the face of the myriad of dramatic changes that are characteristic of the "Information Age," the "Third Wave," the "Post-Industrial Society," the "New Millennium," etc., there has to be a permanence, an "infrastructure," upon which the modern enterprise is founded in order to survive the vagaries and uncertainties of this age of discontinuity. It is simply insufficient to respond intuitively to the next market or regulatory demand, to adopt the next new technology, to build one more system or to fix the "legacy problem." The challenge is designing the enterprise infrastructure to prevail beyond the problem d'jour!! The Framework for Enterprise Architecture provides some clear insight into the domain and direction of Enterprise Architecture for survival in the 21st Century.
David Lehman
Title: The Democratization of the Network
Abstract:
"The next five years will see all businesses impacted by fundamental changes in technology, logistics and operations brought about by networks of 'things' and people on-line. There will be a concatenation of inherently chaotic systems with huge uncontrolled and unpredictable peaks in demand. We will be forced to abandon centralized control and adopt autonomous work practices. The engineering of such systems demands new skills and levels Of understanding that are currently unavailable through any conventional mathematical or engineering models..." The billions of tags, computers/controllers, sensors and people netted together, implicit within Peter Cochrane's vision quoted above, require new highly distributed management strategies and infrastructures to deal with the potential challenges existing in today's and tomorrows technology. The continuous, relentless shrinking of processing power and devices by Moore's law, combined with developments in Micro Mechanical Systems and the technology to mix RF and digital signals on a single chip are producing a whole new Internet of things, potentially billions of things. Truly, a courtship for chaos. These things will enable applications from inventory tracking at Wal-Mart to EasyPass/SmartTag, to tracking deployed military forces, to monitoring ports of entry ... the list is endless. But these things cannot do anything useful individually. They must be part of a distributed system. Our challenge is providing the underlying principals for autonomously managing this enterprise, for maintaining focus and staying out of the noise.
