Welcome!

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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News

  • Article “Object Centric Debugging”, accepted as technical paper at ICSE'12
  • 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
  • ACM Best Paper award at MODELS 2011 for “Expressing Aspectual Interactions in Design: Experiences in the Slot Machine Domain” by J. Fabry, A. Zambrano and S. Gordillo.
  • 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!

Research

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

Teaching

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.