by Heather Miller

"Language Support for Distributed Systems in Scala"

( MPI-SWS talk in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Recent years have seen a rise in distributed systems for interactive, large-scale data processing. Cutting-edge systems focus on reducing latency and increasing expressiveness in order to provide an interactive and rich experience to more and varied users coming from emerging fields such as data science. Meanwhile, the languages and runtimes underlying such systems face numerous challenges in the context of the severely demanding needs of these new distributed systems; popular languages and runtimes like Scala and the JVM (a) limit the customizability of fundamental operations like serialization, and (b) expose low-level distribution-related errors to application developers and end users when trying to distribute core language features, such as functions. This talk presents three systems that (a) give more control over these primitives to distributed systems builders thereby enabling important optimizations, and (b) increase the reliability of distributing functions and objects. Theoretical, experimental, and empirical results are used in the validation of our work.

Bio: Heather Miller is an Assistant Clinical Professor at Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science in Boston and the Executive Director of the Scala Center at EPFL, where she is also a Research Scientist. She recently completed her PhD in EPFL’s Faculty of Computer and Communication Science where she worked on the now-widespread programming language, Scala. Heather’s research interests are at the intersection of data-centric distributed systems and programming languages, with a focus on transferring her research results into industrial use. She has also taught and led development of several popular MOOCs some 1,000,000 students strong, such as "Big Data Analysis in Scala and Spark" and “Functional Programming Principles in Scala.”