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Presentation: "Actor Thinking"
Time:
Friday 10:35 - 11:35
Location:
Stanford Room
Abstract:
Our intuitve grasp of reality is inherently concurrent and stateful.
We react to events based on our present knowledge and we observe that
the behavior of others changes over time. The Actor model of
computation directly reflects this experiential world-view.
Activities are intrinsically parallel. Sequencing must be
orchestrated.
Actor Thinking suggests a significant change in the way we compose
computer systems. Our focus shifts to interactions and protocols.
Our designs revolve around reactive behaviors. Emergent behavior
arises from systems of autonomous agents with decentralized control.
Actor-based design may seem foreign, but it is in fact quite
intuitive. Fortunately, examples of actor-like solution patterns
exist all around us. The world is filled with autonomous agents
reacting to asynchronous events based on purely local information.
Actor-based systems operate the same way. Actor Thinking helps us
realize computer-based solutions using patterns we observe in daily
life.
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Dale Schumacher, Professional Gadfly
Dale Schumacher is passionate about applying computer technology to
enhance human capabilities. In pursuit of this goal he continues to
explore and learn about the nature of human/computer systems. In the
last three decades this has included: agile and lean organizational
processes, distributed enterprise systems, web-based applications,
real-time embedded systems, language design, simulations, digital
imaging and computer visualization. He is a polyglot programmer
facinated with the diversity of problem-solving approaches inherent in
each computational model.
His open-source contributions include: communication protocols,
standard libraries for C, the "clean" font family for the X-Window
system, enhancements to the Minix O/S kernel and a Java servlet-based
wiki. He contributed to "Graphics Gems" volumes I, II and III, and
edited the collective work "Software Solutions in C". Outside of
coaching and mentoring, his focus the last few years has been on the
development of an Actor Based Environment for prototyping actor
solutions. He prefers to work in collaboration with others, and
values craftsmanship and intrinsic quality in all his work.
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