Geneva

Site Profile

Node:

Geneva

IDOM Role:

Technical Contributor

Status:

EFTA Member

Organisation:

Centre Universitaire d'Informatique

University of Geneva

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Simon Gibbs

Address:

CUI

University of Geneva

24 rue General Dufour

Geneva 1211

Country:

Switzerland

Telephone:

+41 -22 -705 7770

Fax:

+41 -22 -320 2927

E-mail:

simon@cui.unige.ch

(no Eudora attachments)

WWW home page:

http://cui_www.unige.ch/

Anonymous FTP server:

ftp://cui.unige.ch/

Gopher server:

none

WAIS server:

none

Further Site Information:

The Object Systems Group at The Centre Universitaire d'Informatique (CUI) has a strong group in the area of object-oriented systems and applications, led by Prof. D. Tsichritzis, Dr. O. Nierstrasz and Dr. S. Gibbs. Recent papers and descriptions of research activities and personnel is located here.

Contact person for technical issues (e-mail, servers, ...):

Dr. Simon Gibbs

Scientific and Technical Contributions

Work Emphasis of the Site

The Centre Universitaire d'Informatique (CUI) has a strong group in the area of object-oriented systems and applications, led by Prof. D. Tsichritzis, Dr. O. Nierstrasz and Dr. S. Gibbs. The group is carrying out research in the following areas:

Active Objects: An experimental programming language called Hybrid that integrates concurrency features and persistence with object-oriented mechanisms supporting reuse has been designed and implemented. Simultaneously, a LISP-based system was developed implementing distributed active objects (called KNOs) that are capable of dynamically inheriting and modifying their behaviour. Subsequent work has focussed on formal computational models of active objects, an executable notation for specifying and prototyping language features, and a model for implementing strongly distributed object-oriented systems.

Object-Oriented Development Tools: Early work on a temporal scripting language for composing graphical animations has led to various efforts to develop tools that support software composition and reuse. The visual scripting tool is an interactive direct manipulation tool for specifying applications as compositions of visually-presented software components. The work on visual scripting is part of ITHACA, a large ESPRIT II project on OO application development. Related work includes XOS, a data model for software information systems, and the affinity browser, a tool for navigating through a large object space by means of dynamically changing notions of affinity between objects. Formal techniques have also been applied to (1) the automatic reorganization of evolving class hierarchies, and (2) the specification of object life-cycles to cope with evolution in information systems. Multimedia Environments: More recently, work has begun in the development of a multimedia framework end environment for implementing advanced multimedia applications.

Collections of papers on object-oriented systems have appeared as several CUI technical reports: ``Objects and Things'' (1987), ``Active Object Environments'' (1988), ``Object-Oriented Development'' (1989), ``Object Management'' (1990) and ``Object Composition'' (1991).

Research Projects and Cooperation

ITHACA is an ESPRIT II Technology Integration Project (2705) led by SNI (Berlin), with partners Bull (Paris), Datamont (Milan), TAO (Barcelona), FORTH (Heraklion) and the CUI (University of Geneva). The project seeks to produce a complete environment for the development of software applications, with particular attention to information systems, based heavily on object-oriented technology. The project provides a tightly integrated object-oriented programming language and object-oriented database, a suite of programming, debugging and version management tools, a software information base of reusable software descriptions, and tools for developing applications from reusable components.

Industrial and other External Liaison

In addition to participation as a partner in ITHACA, the group has collaboration agreements with the Swiss PTT and with the Union Bank of Switzerland's Ubilab research laboratory.

Teaching Activities

Members of the group are responsible for two undergraduate courses, one in Systems Programming and the other in Communication Systems.

Curricula Vitae

Oscar Nierstrasz

is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva. He completed his M.Sc. in 1981 and his Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of Toronto, in the area of Office Information Systems. Since then he has worked at the Institute of Computer Science in Crete and at the CUI, in the area of object-oriented programming languages and systems, particularly in the design of Hybrid, a concurrent object-oriented programming language developed at CUI. He is very active in field of object-oriented research, having served as organizing chair for ECOOP '91 and as vice-chair of CHOOSE, the Swiss SIG on OO systems and environments. He has also served on the programme committees of several ECOOP, OOPSLA and TOOLS conferences, amongst others. His current research interests include computational models for concurrent object-oriented languages and systems, and high-level programming tools to support reusability and evolution of open applications.

Dennis Tsichritzis

is currently a chaired Professor of Office Informations Systems and Communication Systems at the Business School of the University of Geneva and director of the Centre universitaire d'informatique. He obtained a diploma from the National Technical University of Athens as an Electrical Engineer in 1965. He continued his studies in Computer Science at Princeton, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1968. From 1968 until 1985, he was a professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto. He has also participated in the development of the Computer Science Department and Research Institute in Crete. D. Tsichritzis is the author of several books and articles on Theory, Operating Systems, Data Base Systems, Office Information Systems and Object Oriented Systems. He has been a consultant to several major Companies, Research Institute and Government agencies.

Simon Gibbs

is Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva. His research interests include database support for software development, computer supported cooperative work, multimedia systems, and semantic data modelling.

Significant Publications

1. S.J. Gibbs, D.C. Tsichritzis, E. Casais, O.M. Nierstrasz and X. Pintado: "Class Management for Software Communities", Communications of the ACM, vol. 33, no. 9, pp. 90-103, Sept 1990.

2. O.M. Nierstrasz: "Active Objects in Hybrid", ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Proceedings OOPSLA '87, vol. 22, no. 12, pp. 243-253, Dec 1987.

3. O.M. Nierstrasz, "A Survey of Object-Oriented Concepts", in Object-Oriented Concepts, Databases and Applications, ed. W. Kim and F. Lochovsky, pp. 3-21, ACM Press and Addison-Wesley, 1989.

4. O.M. Nierstrasz and M. Papathomas: "Viewing Objects as Patterns of Communicating Agents", ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Proceedings OOPSLA/ECOOP '90, vol. 25, no. 10, pp. 38-43, Oct 1990.

5. O. Nierstrasz, D. Tsichritzis, V. de Mey and M. Stadelmann: "Objects + Scripts = Applications", Proceedings, ESPRIT 1991 Conference, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, NL, 1991, to appear.

6. D.C. Tsichritzis, E. Fiume, S. Gibbs and O.M. Nierstrasz: "KNOs: Knowledge Acquisition, Dissemination and Manipulation Objects", ACM TOOIS, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 96-112, Jan 1987.

7. D.C. Tsichritzis and O.M. Nierstrasz: Application Development Using Objects", in Information Technology for Organisational Systems, Proceedings EURINFO '88, ed. H.-J. Bullinger et al., pp. 15-23, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland), 1988.

8. D.C. Tsichritzis and O.M. Nierstrasz: "Fitting Round Objects into Square Databases", in Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-oriented Programming, ed. S. Gjessing and K. Nygaard, LNCS 322, pp. 283-299, Springer-Verlag, Oslo, August 15-17, 1988.

9. D.C. Tsichritzis and O.M. Nierstrasz: "Directions in Object-Oriented Research", in Object-Oriented Concepts, Databases and Applications, ed. W. Kim and F. Lochovsky, pp. 523-536, ACM Press and Addison-Wesley, 1989.

10. D. Tsichritzis: "Object-Oriented Development for Open Systems", Information Processing 89 (Proceedings IFIP '89), pp. 1033-1040, North-Holland, San Fancisco, Aug 28-Sept 1, 1989.