Subject: SEN1 Meeting Tomorrow 10am: Mike Godfrey
From: Bas Basten
To: sen1-list 
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:26:53 +0100 (CET)

Dear all,

From now on, our weekly SEN1 Meetings will be held on Wednesdays in
stead of Thursdays. The starting time will be the same. This week's talk
will thus be tomorrow, and will be given by Mike Godfrey. Mike is
visiting us from the University of Waterloo, Canada, as a CWI
Distinguished Scientist. He will give the following talk:


Squinting at the data: Investigating software artifact provenance using
KISS techniques

                            Michael W. Godfrey
                          University of Waterloo

``Provenance'' is a term from archaeology and the arts that refers to a
set of evidence supporting the claimed origin of an artifact, such as a
piece of pottery or an oil painting.  Recently, the term has been used
in an electronic context --- ``digital provenance'' --- to indicate an
artifact such as a software component or set of data, really is what it
claims to be and should be permitted to be used within sensitive
operating environments.

In this talk, I suggest how we can stretch the definition further to
encompass "software artifact provenance".  That is, for a given software
development artifact such as a user-visible feature, a source code
function, or a third-party library, we might want to ask the question:
Where did this come from and what is the evidence?  For example, one
might wonder how a given feature was decided upon during a mailing list
discussion, how it manifested itself in the code, and how it has been
maintained since the initial implementation.  For a given function, one
might wonder about its history within the design of the system:  Was it
designed to fit exactly here, or was it moved or cloned from elsewhere?
And for a given third-party jar file that has been included in a Java
system distribution, one might ask:  What version of the library is
this, and how do we know?  

In this talk I will sketch some of the ideas behind this work, and show
how we might phrase some of these questions in terms of concrete
criteria.  In particular, we will concentrate on simple techniques for
reducing a large search space of candidates down to a small handful that
can be examined in detail using more expensive techniques.  A concrete
example of investigating third-party libraries in Java systems will be
presented.

This is joint work with Daniel German of the University of Victoria,
Julius Davies of the University of British Columbia, and Abram Hindle of
the University of Alberta.


As usual we start at 10am in room L016. Hope to see you all there.

Cheers,
Bas