Subject:
	Lecture by Ralf Lämmel (Friday Dec, 8, 14:00)
Date:
	Mon, 04 Dec 2006 11:53:11 +0100
From:
	Paul Klint 
To:
	SEN-list, INS-list

You are cordially invited to the following lecture:


Speaker:
       Ralf Lämmel, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA

Title:  Who needs a language engineer?

Venue:  Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica,
       Kruislaan 413, 1098 SJ Amsterdam

Room:   M279

Date:   Friday, December 8, 2006

Time:   14:00 -- 15:00


Abstract:

Language engineers are into grammars, types and declarative programs;
they seek to facilitate these concepts for the purpose of improving
the practice of software development; they push forward
language-engineering foundations inspired by practical needs. How
capable are today's language engineers? What are the challenges for
language-engineering research ahead of us? I use the format of a
"stress test for a language engineer" to provide subjective answers to
these questions. This stress test comprises a number of milestones,
e.g.: (i) re-engineer a data-processing application so that it uses a
new XML API instead of an old one; (ii) given a mapping tool from XML
schemas to object models, enable OO-level class refactoring to affect
the underlying XML schemas appropriately. The result of my reflection
is rather terrifying in terms of the limits that we face, but this is
good news from the perspective of a researcher.



Bio Ralf Lämmel

Dr. Ralf Lämmel serves as Program Manager in the Data Programmability
Team at Microsoft Corp., Redmond. He works on incubation and
development projects with focus on XML technology and XML
programming. In the years 2001--2004, Ralf Lämmel served on a
permanent faculty position, at the Free University of Amsterdam, in
the Software Engineering department, and he was also affiliated with
the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) --
starting in 1999. Ralf Lämmel received his PhD in computer science
from the University of Rostock, Germany. His research interests
include program transformation, programming languages, generic
language technology, grammarware engineering, and automated software
engineering. Ralf Lämmel has published more than 50 peer-reviewed
papers on these subjects, and he has been collaborating in a number of
research projects on these subjects. In addition to the normal
involvement in the scientific community, he currently focuses on
bootstrapping a PhD summer school series on generative and
transformational techniques in software engineering.