Manuel Serrano

From PCs to tablets: Programming the Diffuse Web.

Abstract: Personal computing has been radically changed by smartphones and tablets. Within a few years, these new devices have become as numerous as personal computers. They have also almost bridged the performance gap. A modern smartphone is equipped with a hardware that can compete the traditional laptop on many aspects.

Since we permanently carry our phones with us. Since they are always connected to a network and since they are equipped with a vast set of sensors, they allow us to implement new applications that were inconceivable a few years back in the past: the diffuse applications.

However, programming diffuse applications is difficult because it combines all the hardest points of the traditional programming to which it brings new problems of its own. In this course, we will present a new programming language called Hop, specially designed for addressing these problems. We will present the language, its constructs, its semantics, and how to program realistic diffuse applications.

Bio: Manuel Serrano is a Senior Scientist at INRIA, leading the INDES (Informatique Diffuse et Sécurisée) team in Sophia-Antipolis. After completing his PhD (Paris VI, 1994), on the compilation of functional languages, he moved to Nice and created the Bigloo development environment for Scheme. He joined INRIA in 2001, and has focussed on development environments for the diffuse web since 2005.