Onward! 2017
Sun 22 - Fri 27 October 2017 Vancouver, Canada
co-located with SPLASH 2017
Thu 26 Oct 2017 14:30 - 15:00 at Regency B - Programming Models Chair(s): Karim Ali

Programmatically controllable home devices are proliferating, ranging from lights, locks, and motion sensors to smart refrigerators, televisions, and cameras, giving end users unprecedented control over their environment. New domain-specific languages are emerging to supplant general purpose programming platforms as a means for end users to configure home automation. These languages, based on event-condition-action (ECA) rules, have an appealing simplicity. But programmatic control lets users write programs with bugs, introducing the frustrations of software engineering with none of the tool support. The subtle semantics of the home automation domain—and the varying interfaces and implementation strategies that existing home automation platforms use—exacerbates the problem.

In this work, we present the Internet of Things Automation (IoTa) calculus, the first calculus for the domain of home automation. IoTa models an ECA language equipped with first-class notions of time, state, and device aggregation, and comes equipped with a precise semantics inspired by a careful analysis of five existing home automation platforms. We show that the IoTa calculus is useful by implementing two analyses from the software engineering literature, and expressive by encoding sixteen programs from these home automation platforms. Along the way, we highlight where the design of the IoTa semantics rules out subtle classes of bugs.

Thu 26 Oct

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

13:30 - 15:00
Programming ModelsOnward! Papers at Regency B
Chair(s): Karim Ali University of Alberta
13:30
30m
Talk
The Serverless Trilemma: Function Composition for Serverless Computing
Onward! Papers
Ioana Baldini IBM T.J. Watson Research, Perry Cheng IBM Research, Stephen J Fink IBM, Nick Mitchell , Vinod Muthusamy IBM T.J. Watson Research, Rodric Rabbah IBM Research, Philippe Suter Two Sigma, Olivier Tardieu IBM Research
14:00
30m
Talk
Encoding the building blocks of communication
Onward! Papers
14:30
30m
Talk
IoTa: A Calculus for Internet of Things Automation
Onward! Papers
Julie L. Newcomb University of California at Berkeley, Satish Chandra Facebook, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin Carnegie Mellon University , Cole Schlesinger Samsung Research America, Manu Sridharan Uber