Keynote I Middleware for Pervasive and Cyber-Physical Systems

Middleware typically provides abstractions for common tasks such as atomicity, synchronization and communication with the intention of isolating the developers of distributed applications from lower-level details of the underlying platforms. Although one would like to develop generic middleware services which can be used in a variety of different applications, efficiency considerations often force developers to design middleware and algorithms customized to specific operational contexts. In this talk, we will describe our efforts to develop a comprehensive framework for automated customization of distributed algorithms and middleware. That is, given a generic algorithm or a middleware service, how can it be automatically customized for a specific distributed application? We will focus on developing techniques to design middleware amenable to customization, techniques for specify and identify customization opportunities, and code transformations techniques to perform the customizations. We also discuss the challenges poised in designing middleware for pervasive sensor networks and cyber-physical systems. .