The PLEIAD laboratory of the Computer Science Department (DCC) of the University of Chile (Faculty of Engineering) is a laboratory dedicated to research on new software development techniques.

PLEIAD stands for Programming Languages and Environments for Intelligent, Adaptable and Distributed systems. We explore how programming language constructs and environments can enable the development of evolvable and highly-adaptable software, particularly considering distributed computing.

A non-technical overview of our activities, created for the magazine of the DCC, is available in Spanish (original version) and in English (translated from the original).

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• Three papers of PLEIAD accepted at FOAL 2012! “A Practical Monadic Aspect Weaver” (Figueroa/Tanter/Tabareau), “A Self-Replicating Algorithm to Flexibly Match Execution Traces” (Leger/Tanter), “Taming Aspects with Membranes” (Tanter/Tabareau/Douence).

• A.Bergel got his regular FONDECYT project accepted. Period 2012 - 2014.

• É. Tanter was given the Best professor award (for undergrad teaching), Computer Science Dept, University of Chile, 2011

• The project ASPIRE: Assess, Visualize and Reengineer Software Engineering processes with the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis has been accepted

• A. Bergel is PC member of CibSE 2012, ICSOFT 2012, PPPJ 2012, GPCE 2012

• David Röthlisberger joined Pleiad as a postdoc. Welcome David!

• R. Robbes is PC member of ICSM 2012 and ICPC 2012

• É. Tanter is PC member of SAC 2012, FOAL 2012, and OOPSLA 2012

• É. Tanter is Program Chair of AOSD 2012

• Our paper on Access Control in JavaScript has been published in IEEE Software

• R. Robbes had a FONDECYT project accepted!

• Paper Evaluating defect prediction approaches: a benchmark and an extensive comparison accepted for publication in Empirical Software Engineering

• Article “Execution profiling blueprints”, accepted for publication in Software: Practice and Experience

• R. Robbes will be chair of ICSM ERA 2013

• R. Robbes is PC member of two ICSE tracks: Formal Tool Demos, and Informal Tool Demos and Posters

• FlowTalk: Language Support for Long-Latency Operations in Embedded Devices is finally published at TSE, nearly 2 years after its acceptance

• R. Robbes is PC member of MSR 2012 and CSMR 2012

• The paper presenting PHANtom by J. Fabry and D. Galdames was accepted at the International Workshop On Smalltalk Technologies at the ESUG 2011 conference.

• R. Robbes will give a tutorial on Mining Software Repositories at ICSM 2011

• Paper on Ambient Contracts published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

• Paper “Expressing Aspectual Interactions in Design: Experiences in the Slot Machine Domain” by J. Fabry, A. Zambrano and S. Gordillo was accepted at MODELS 2011

• Tool demo: “Gaucho: Programming == Modeling” accepted at ECOOP 2011

• Paper: “Enabling Program Comprehension through a Visual Object-focused Development Environment” accepted at VL/HCC 2011

• Guillaume Pothier successfully defended his PhD thesis on making omniscient debugging practical

• Paper on “First-Class State Change in Plaid” accepted at OOPSLA 2011

• Our paper “How Developers Use the Dynamic Features of Programming Languages: the Case of Smalltalk” won the Best Paper Award MSR 2011!

• Three (3!!!) papers of PLEIAD accepted at ECOOP 2011! “Gradual Typestate” (Wolff/Garcia/Tanter/Aldrich), “Summarized Trace Indexing and Querying for Scalable Back-in-Time Debugging” (Pothier/Tanter), and “Counting Messages as a Proxy for Average Execution Time in Pharo” (Bergel).

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Our research is situated at the intersection of Programming Languages and Paradigms, Distributed and Pervasive Computing, and Artificial Intelligence. The main focus is on Software Adaptation in a broad sense.

More specifically, we are involved in research related to:

• Computational reflection
• Program transformations
• Domain-specific languages
• Aspect-oriented programming
• Ambient-oriented programming
• Distribution and concurrency
• Biologically-inspired computing and AI
• Software visualization
• Code profiling
• Software Engineering

Main software artifacts:

• AspectScript: an aspect-oriented extension of JavaScript for expressive AOP; integrates several state-of-the-art features related to higher-order programming and expressive scoping of aspects.
• TOD: a practical omniscient debugger for Java, integrated into Eclipse
• Scheme interpreters and executable semantics artifacts, exploring different facets of scoping in programming language design, in particular for aspect- and context-oriented programming
• Reflex: versatile kernel for multi-language AOP
• Moose: an agile and open software analysis platform
• Hapao: a visual test coverage tool

PLEIAD members are involved in teaching various courses. Course information can be found on the teaching page. Thesis proposals (Engineering and Masters), are on the thesis page.