Events Calendar

CS Colloq: The Impact of Research on the Development of Middleware Technology

Title: The Impact of Research on the Development of Middleware TechnologySpeaker: Professor Wolfgang EmmerichABSTRACT:
The middleware market represents a sizable segment of the overall Information
and Communication Technology market. In 2005, the annual middleware license
revenue was reported by Gartner to be in the region of
8.5 billion US Dollars. In this talk we address the question whether research
had any involvement in the creation of the technology that is being sold in
this market? We attempt a scholarly discourse. We present the research method
that we have applied to answer this question. We then present a brief
introduction into the key middleware concepts that provide the foundation for
this market. It would not be feasible to investigate any possible impact that
research might have had. Instead we select a few very successful technologies
that are representative for the middleware market as a whole and show the
existence of impact of research results in the creation of these technologies.
We investigate the origins of web services middleware, distributed transaction
processing middleware, message oriented middleware, distributed object
middleware and remote procedure call systems. For each of these technologies
we are able to show ample influence of research and conclude that without the
research conducted by PhD students and researchers in university computer
science labs at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, and University
of Washington as well as research in industrial labs at APM, AT&T Bell Labs,
DEC Systems Research, HP Labs, IBM Research and Xerox PARC we would not have
middleware technology in its current form. We summarise by distilling lessons
that can be learnt from this evidenced impact for future technology transfer
undertakings.BIO:
Wolfgang Emmerich holds the Chair in Distributed Computing in the Department
of Computer Science at University College London. He is Director of Research
in the Dept. of Computer Science. He received his undergraduate degree in
Informatics from the University of Dortmund in 1990 and went on to conduct
research into process-centred software engineering environments. He received a
PhD in Computer Science from University of Paderborn in 1995. After a brief
post-doctoral appointment at the Software Verification Research Centre of the
University of Queensland in Brisbane, he joined The City University as a
Lecturer in 1996. He was appointed as a Lecturer at UCL in the Department of
Computer Science in 1997 and co-founded the Software Systems Engineering
Research Group, which he currently heads. He is a member of the ACM SIGSOFT
Impact project (see http://www.acm.org/sigsoft/impact) where the work
described here was conducted. In parallel to his academic career, he worked
for the Central European OMG representation on the CORBA middleware
specification and co-founded three start-up companies. He is a co-founder,
partner and non-executive director of the Zuhlke Technology Group.

Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 123

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia