June 2011 - Haskell - Haskell.org

ANNOUNCE: Data Binding
by Gideon 15 Jun '11

15 Jun '11

I am pleased to announce the first release of the data binding framework for Haskell [1]. The binding-core package [2] is a library for binding mutable data and lists to IO objects. binding-gtk [3] and binding-wx [4] are convenient wrappers for binding to Gtk2Hs and WxHaskell respectively. Feedback is welcome. Cabal install and enjoy! - Gideon [1] http://code.accursoft.com/binding [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/binding-core [3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/binding-gtk [4] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/binding-wx

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faculty, postdoc and Ph.D. positions in functional high-performance computing
by henglein＠diku.dk 12 Jun '11

12 Jun '11

The recently established Research Center for Functional High-Performance Computing for Financial Information Technology (HIPERFIT) at the University of Copenhagen has openings for 1 permanent faculty position and 6 postdoc or Ph.D. scholar positions, starting September 1st or later this year. The faculty position is at the assistant or associate professor position, depending on the applicant's seniority. The postdoc positions are for up to 3 years, and the Ph.D. scholar positions are full-time salaried positions for either 3 or 4 years. Applicants with documented knowledge of functional programming and/or domain-specific languages are highly encouraged to apply. Deadline: July 4th, 2011. Position start: September 1, 2011, or later. HIPERFIT gathers researchers from mathematical finance (MF), domain-specific languages (DSL), functional programming (FP) and high-performance systems (HPS) and experts from financial sector institutions to solve the simultaneous challenges of high transparency, high computational performance and high productivity in finance by mapping high-level models and languages directly onto the evolving crop of inexpensive highly parallel computer architectures such as GPGPUs. Candidates are expected to have a solid academic background within one or more of the 4 research areas (MF, DSL, FP, HPS) as demonstrated by documented knowledge related to: Multidimensional diffusion stock market models (MF) Bond market theory and credit risk theory (MF) Jump-diffusion models and stochastic volatility models (MF) Functional programming, other declarative programming paradigms (FP, DSLs and HPS) Formal semantics, type theory and type systems, program logics and verification (FP, DSLs and HPS) Program analysis and transformation, programming language implementation (FP, DSLs and HPS) Theory and practice of parallel and/or concurrent programming (FP, DSLs and HPS) Computer architecture (HPS). They are also expected to take an active interest in cooperating with researchers in the other areas. (Putting it informally: You are demonstrably at home in one of the areas -- one is enough, more are welcome -- and you are excited, rather than put off, worried or indifferent, about learning about and engaging yourself with specialists from the other areas.) HIPERFIT deliberately pursues high-risk research with a potentially disruptive strategic impact on high-performance computing practice, viewing the dramatic changes in commodity computing platforms from being sequential to massively parallel as an opportunity for ``naturally'' parallel high-level programming languages to effectively bridge problem/solution specifications on the one side and evolving parallel computer architectures on the other. In this fashion HIPERFIT complements the prevalent retrofitting and adaptation of existing code bases and low-level coding for specific parallel machine architectures. Applicants with a background in functional programming and declarative domain-specific languages are thus particularly encouraged to apply. For more information on HIPERFIT, see http://www.hiperfit.dk. For detailed information on the position announcements, including application details and contact information, see http://www.offentlige-stillinger.dk/sites/cfml/kbhuni/kbhuniVis.cfm?plugin=…. Please follow the application instructions carefully and do not send nonspecific email inquiries (e.g. "Dear Professor: I want to be a Ph.D. student. Here is my CV. What should I write a Ph.D. about?"), as they risk not receiving any response. We are happy to field inquiries, which are clearly informed by and specific to the position announcements, the information on hiperfit.dk and information obtained from HIPERFIT investigators' home pages.

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PhD position on "Certified Compilation for High Level Parallel Programming"
by Frédéric Dabrowski 09 Jun '11

09 Jun '11

The Computer Science Laboratory of Orleans in the University of Orleans (France) and the School of Information in the Kochi University of Technology are looking for a PhD researcher (3 years: 2 in France, 1 in Japan) to work on the "Parallel Program Development with Algorithmic Skeletons" project (PaPDAS) funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Japan Science and Technology agency (JST). The deadline for application is the 20th of June, 2011. Further information and application requirements: http://traclifo.univ-orleans.fr/PaPDAS

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Haskell Weekly News: Issue 185
by Daniel Santa Cruz 09 Jun '11

09 Jun '11

Welcome to issue 180 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. This release covers the week of May 29 to Jun 4, 2011. You can find the HTML version at: http://goo.gl/Tm1Qu Announcements Sebastian Fischer wrote in to inform us of of a student internship for parallel Haskell at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo. The internship is for up to three months, between July and September 2011. http://goo.gl/xHjkn EIJIRO Sumii reminded us that the ICFP Programming Contest 2011 will be starting on June 17. http://goo.gl/eumwm Quotes of the Week * Tom Murphy: Great! New I really can say "Come on! It's fun! I can write foldr with foldl!" * Cale: C++, Y U SO UGLY? * xplat: nae, that'd be 'arr, my small example ain't half near as yellow as a lily-livered spaniard! scupper me wi' a cutlass, arr.' * Cale: rnf accidentally the entire data structure Top Reddit Stories * Haskell and parallelism in the Economist Domain: economist.com, Score: 66, Comments: 5 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/rBnc1 Original: http://goo.gl/vFtGY * I have the world's coolest hoodie (X-post from r/programming) Domain: imgur.com, Score: 28, Comments: 15 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/bk5wt Original: http://goo.gl/CT3fb * An OpenGL in Haskell anecdote which illustrates the obvious, HOpenGL is low level and imperative. Domain: haskell.org, Score: 27, Comments: 24 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/QtDNy Original: http://goo.gl/LUoL9 * Yesod for non-Haskellers (also, for Haskellers) Domain: yesodweb.com, Score: 27, Comments: 2 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/ekOQJ Original: http://goo.gl/UCyIv * Fast forwarding lrand48() Domain: blog.sigfpe.com, Score: 24, Comments: 0 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/Ki0in Original: http://goo.gl/5ICat * Silk (Haskell, semantic web start up) is hiring in Amsterdam Domain: news.ycombinator.com, Score: 24, Comments: 0 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/GUFVP Original: http://goo.gl/j8fRW * Nikki and the Robots 0.3 is out Domain: joyridelabs.de, Score: 23, Comments: 7 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/w3yrF Original: http://goo.gl/sJdwj * Introducing the Yesod Wiki Domain: yesodweb.com, Score: 19, Comments: 0 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/4TStP Original: http://goo.gl/noMVO * Communicating Haskell Processes: The Long And The Short Of It Domain: chplib.wordpress.com, Score: 19, Comments: 0 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/mC8cw Original: http://goo.gl/hHHoH * What libraries from scientific computing have yet to be written? Domain: self.haskell, Score: 17, Comments: 23 On Reddit: http://goo.gl/QXwyA Top StackOverflow Questions * "A proof is a program; the formula it proves is a type for the program" [migrated] votes: 17, answers: 0 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/LfzPM * Writing foldl using foldr votes: 16, answers: 2 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/O7I0Z * Binary Serialization for Lists of Undefined Length in Haskell votes: 13, answers: 1 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/pZkyI * From C ++ to Haskell Classes and States votes: 12, answers: 2 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/yYt9R * Why does Haskell force data constructor's first letter to be upper case? votes: 11, answers: 3 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/dnGIl * Why is such a function definition not allowed in haskell ? votes: 10, answers: 5 Read on SO: http://goo.gl/0RoHY About the Haskell Weekly News To help create new editions of this newsletter, please send stories to dstcruz(a)gmail.com. Until next time, Daniel Santa Cruz

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Parallel GHC project: new opportunity for an organisation to participate
by Duncan Coutts 08 Jun '11

08 Jun '11

GHC HQ and Well-Typed are pleased to announce a new opportunity for an organisation to take part in the Parallel GHC Project. The project started in November 2010 with four industrial partners, and consulting and engineering support from Well-Typed. Each organisation is working on its own particular project making use of parallel Haskell. The overall goal is to demonstrate successful use of parallel Haskell and along the way to apply engineering effort to any problems with the tools that the partner organisations might run into. We have capacity to support another partner organisation for the remaining duration of the project (at least another 12 months). Organisations do not need to contribute financially but should be prepared to make a significant commitment of their own time. Familiarity with Haskell would be helpful, but Haskell expertise is not needed. Partner organisations' choice of projects is similarly open-ended and could be based on anything from pre-existing code bases to green field endeavours. We would welcome organisations interested in pure parallelism, concurrency and/or distributed Haskell. Presently, two of our partner organisations are using mainly pure parallelism and two are using concurrency. What would be especially interesting for us is to diversify this mix further by working with an organisation interested in making use of of distributed Haskell, in particular the work highlighted in the recent paper "Haskell for the Cloud" [1]. To help give an idea what participating in the Parallel GHC Project is like, here is what some of what our current partner organisations have to say: The Parallel GHC Project has enabled us to make steady progress towards our goals. Well-typed has provided support in the form of best practice recommendations, general engagement with the project, and directly coding up key components. I have been getting lots of help from Well-Typed, and enjoy our weekly meetings. -- Finlay Thompson, Dragonfly My organization is now trying to implement highly concurrent Web servers. After GHC 7 was released we faced several critical bugs in the new IO manager and one guy at Well-Typed kindly fixed all the bugs. This has been a big benefit for our organization. Another benefit is feedback/suggestions from Well-Typed. Well-Typed and our organization have meetings every other week and we report progress to each other. During the discussions, we can set the right direction to go in. -- Kazu Yamamoto, IIJ Innovation Institute Inc. Well-Typed is coordinating the project, working directly with the participating organisations and the Simons at GHC HQ. If you think your organisation may be interested then get in touch with me via info(a)well-typed.com [1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/parallel/remot… -- Duncan Coutts, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/

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Final call for papers: 8th CHR workshop
by Jon Sneyers 08 Jun '11

08 Jun '11

Apologies if you receive multiple copies ________________________________________ Call for Papers ------------------------------------------------------------ Eighth International Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules CHR 2011 September 9, 2011 Cairo, Egypt Co-located with the Second CHR Summer School ------------------------------------------------------------ http://met.guc.edu.eg/events/chr2011/ws.html Introduction ------------ The Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) language has become a major declarative specification formalism and implementation language for constraint reasoning algorithms and applications. Algorithms are often specified using inference rules, rewrite rules, sequents, proof rules or logical axioms that can be directly written in CHR. Its clean semantics facilitates program design, analysis and transformation. See the CHR website (http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/) for more information. The aim of the CHR workshop series is to stimulate and promote international research and collaboration on topics related to the Constraint Handling Rules language. The workshop is a lively, friendly forum for presenting and discussing new results, interesting applications, and work in progress. Previous CHR workshops were organized in 2004 in Ulm (Germany), in 2005 in Sitges (Spain) at ICLP, in 2006 in Venice (Italy) at ICALP, in 2007 in Porto (Portgual) at ICLP, in 2008 in Hagenberg (Austria) at RTA, in 2009 in Pasadena (California, US) at ICLP and in 2010 in Edinburgh (Scotland) at ICLP. The workshop proceedings will be published as a technical report. Topics of Interest ------------------ The workshop calls for full papers and short papers describing ongoing work on any aspect of CHR and related approaches. The following topics are relevant (this list is non-exhaustive): - (Logical) Algorithms - Applications - Comparisons with Related Approaches - Constraint Solvers - Critical Assessment - Expressivity and Complexity - Implementations and Optimization - Language Extensions (Types, Modules, ...) - Program Analysis - Program Transformation and Generation - Programming Environments (Debugging) - Programming Pearls - Programming Tools - Retractable Constraints - Semantics - System Descriptions Important Dates --------------- * Paper Registration (Abstract): June 14, 2011 * Paper Submission: June 21, 2011 * Notification of Authors: July 21, 2011 * Final version due: August 16, 2011 * Workshop date: September 9, 2011 Submission Information ---------------------- All papers must describe original, previously unpublished research, and must not simultaneously be submitted for publication elsewhere. They must be written in English. There are four submission categories: 1. technical papers for describing technically sound, innovative ideas that can advance the state of the art of logic programming; 2. application papers, where the emphasis will be on their impact on the application domain; 3. system and tool papers, where the emphasis will be on the novelty, practicality, usability and general availability of the systems and tools described; 4. technical communications, aimed at describing recent developments, new projects, and other materials that are not ready for main publication as standard papers. Technical papers, application papers, and system and tool papers must not exceed 15 pages including bibliography. The limit for technical communications is 10 pages. The authors are encouraged to submit their papers in Springer LNCS format. General information about the Springer LNCS series and the LNCS authors' instructions are available at the Springer LNCS/LNAI home page (http://www.springeronline.com/lncs/) Submissions can be made via the Easychair submission system, available at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=chr2011. Accepted papers will be published in a technical report. Organization ------------ Program Committee: * Slim Abdennadher, German University in Cairo, Egypt * Henning Christiansen, Roskilde University, Denmark * Francois Fages, INRIA Rocquencourt, France * Thom Fruehwirth, Universitaet Ulm, Germany * Maurizio Gabbrielli, Universita di Bologna, Italy * Remy Haemmerle, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain * Eric Monfroy, Universite de Nantes, France * Paolo Pilozzi, K.U.Leuven, Belgium * Jon Sneyers, K.U.Leuven, Belgium (chair) * Peter J. Stuckey, NICTA Victoria Laboratory, Australia * Armin Wolf, Fraunhofer FIRST, Germany Workshop Coordinator: * Jon Sneyers, K.U.Leuven (Belgium) Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm

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ANNOUNCE: time-recurrence-0.5.2
by Chris Heller 07 Jun '11

07 Jun '11

I'm happy to announce the first fully functional release of time-recurrence: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/time-recurrence As of version 0.5.2, the library is now powerful enough to express all recurring dates which can be specified via the iCalendar RFC. An example: Generate the 15th and the 30th of the month, but only during the work week: > jan2011 = ptime "Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0400" > jan2012 = ptime "Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0400" > takeWhile (<= jan2012) $ recur monthly `starting` jan2011 $ > enumDays [15,30] >=> > filterWeekDays [Monday .. Friday] [2011-02-15 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-03-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-03-30 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-04-15 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-05-30 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-06-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-06-30 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-07-15 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-08-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-08-30 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-09-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-09-30 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-11-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-11-30 04:00:00 UTC ,2011-12-15 04:00:00 UTC, 2011-12-30 04:00:00 UTC ] As always I encourage feedback, criticism, suggestions and pull requests. -Chris

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SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award
by Isaac Potoczny-Jones 07 Jun '11

07 Jun '11

I'm pleased to be able to relay the following announcement from ACM SIGPLAN: The SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award is awarded to an institution or individual(s) to recognize the development a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools. The impact may be reflected in the wide-spread adoption of the system or its underlying concepts by the wider programming language community either in research projects, in the open-source community, or commercially. The award includes a prize of $2,500. For 2011, the winners of the award are Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, for GHC The award winners are donating the entirety of the prize money to haskell.org. Citation: Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow receive the SIGPLAN Software Award as the authors of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), which is the preeminent lazy functional programming system for industry, teaching, and research. GHC has not only provided a language implementation, but also established the whole paradigm of lazy functional programming and formed the foundation of a large and enthusiastic user community. GHC's flexibility has supported experimental research on programming language design in areas as diverse as monads, generalized algebraic data types, rank-N polymorphism, and software transactional memory. Indeed, a large share of the research on lazy functional programming in the last 5–10 years has been carried out with GHC. Simultaneously, GHC's reliability and efficiency has encouraged commercial adoption, in the financial sector in institutions like Credit Suisse and Standard Chartered Bank, and for high assurance software in companies like Amgen, Eaton, and Galois. A measure of GHC's influence is the way that many of the ideas of purely functional, "typeful programming" have been carried into newer languages and language features. including C#, F#, Java Generics, LINQ, Perl 6, Python, and Visual Basic 9.0. Peyton Jones and Marlow have been visionary in the way that they have transitioned research into practice. They have been role models and leaders in creating the large and diverse Haskell community, and have made GHC an industrial-strength platform for commercial development as well as for research. Links: http://www.sigplan.org/award-software.htm http://corp.galois.com/blog/2011/6/7/sigplan-programming-languages-software…

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VSTTE 2012 : First Call for Papers
by Gudmund Grov 06 Jun '11

06 Jun '11

VSTTE 2012 Verified Software: Theories, Tools and Experiments January 28-29, 2012 Philadelphia, USA (co-located with POPL and VMCAI) https://sites.google.com/site/vstte2012/ The Fourth International Conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools, and Experiments will take place on January 28-29, 2012. The focus of the conference is the development of systematic methods for specifying, building, and verifying software. The goal of this conference is to advance the state of the art through the interaction of theory development, tool evolution, and experimental validation. Historically, the conference came out of the Verified Software Initiative (VSI), a cooperative, international initiative directed at the scientific challenges of large-scale software verification. A verification competition will be held in parallel to the conference. Topics of interest include: * Specification and verification techniques * Tool support for specification languages * Tool for various design methodologies * Tool integration and plug-ins * Automation in formal verification * Tool comparisons and benchmark repositories * Combination of tools and techniques (e.g. formal vs. semiformal, software specification vs. engineering techniques) * Customizing tools for particular applications * Challenge problems * Refinement methodologies * Requirements modeling * Specification languages * Specification/verification case-studies * Software design methods * Program logic SUBMISSIONS Submitted research papers and system descriptions must be original and not submitted for publication elsewhere. Research paper submissions are limited to 15 proceedings pages in LNCS format and must include a cogent and self-contained description of the ideas, methods and results, together with a comparison to existing work. System descriptions are also limited to 15 proceedings pages in LNCS format. Authors are encouraged to submit work in progress, particularly if the work involves collaboration, theory unification, and tool integration. Papers can be submitted at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vstte2012 Submissions that arrive late, are not in the proper format, or are too long will not be considered. The proceedings of VSTTE 2012 will be published by Springer-Verlag in the LNCS series. Authors of accepted papers will be requested to sign a form transferring copyright of their contribution to Springer-Verlag. IMPORTANT DATES August 31, 2011: Conference Paper Submission Deadline October 20, 2011: Notification of acceptance November 15, 2011: Final conference paper versions due January 28-29, 2012: Main conference CONFERENCE CHAIR Ernie Cohen, European Microsoft Innovation Center PROGRAM CHAIRS Rajeev Joshi, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Peter Müller, ETH Zurich Andreas Podelski, University of Freiburg PROGRAM COMMITTEE To be announced PUBLICITY CHAIR Gudmund Grov, University of Edinburgh STEERING COMMITTEE Tony Hoare, Microsoft Research Jay Misra, UT Austin Natarajan Shankar, SRI International Jim Woodcock, University of York -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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[CFP] International Workshop on Rigorous Protocol Engineering (WRiPE 2011)
by Anil Madhavapeddy 04 Jun '11

04 Jun '11

This workshop on the construction of correct Internet protocols may be of interest to the Haskell community. -- 1st International Workshop on Rigorous Protocol Engineering (WRiPE 2011) Co-located with the 19th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP 2011), Vancouver, Canada, on October 17th 2011. http://wripe11.cis.upenn.edu/ WRiPE is an inter-disciplinary workshop that will bring together researchers from the networking, formal methods and programming languages communities. ICNP started nearly twenty years ago as a conference focused on the application of formal methods to the design and analysis of protocols primarily from the telecommunication space. This initial focus on formal methods has diminished over the years as ICNP has shifted towards research on Internet protocols. The aim of WRiPE is to reinvigorate and revitalize the application of formal methods to the design and analysis of network protocols. We think the time is ripe for this type of workshop because (1) verification techniques have matured greatly in the last few decades, (2) verification tools such as model checkers, theorem provers, and SAT/SMT solvers have attracted a sizable user base, and (3) such techniques and tools have not traditionally been applied to network protocols (in particular IP, which is now the dominant networking technology). By network protocols, we include traditional IP routing protocols, wireless multi-hop routing, BGP policies, transport protocols, application-layer overlay networks, and enterprise and data center networks. These may also include security extensions to these protocols, e.g. IPSec and Secure BGP, as well as protocols developed using emerging software router platforms such as OpenFlow. By verification technique, we mean any rigorous method of demonstrating that an implementations satisfies a given specification, or that reliable conclusions can be extracted from measurements. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: * Correct-by-Construction methods: meta-model frameworks (logics, algebras, calculi, etc.) for Internet protocols * Applications of model checkers, theorem provers, and SAT/SMT solvers to Internet protocol design. * Domain specific languages (declarative, functional, or logic-based) that raise the level of abstraction in Internet protocol development. * Formal-methods based techniques for run-time verification and testing of Internet protocols. * Combining model checking and theorem proving for verifying Internet protocols. * Model finding techniques for network configuration. Submission guidelines Paper submission will not be blind. The submissions will indicate the names or affiliations of the authors in the paper. Please do not submit abbreviated versions of journal or conference papers. In particular, submissions to WRiPE must not be concurrent with a substantially similar submission to a conference or workshop, including condensed versions of work that has been submitted and is currently under review. We do encourage submissions of work-in-progress based on novel and interesting ideas. Submitted papers must be no longer than six (6) pages in double-column format with standard margins (i.e., at least one inch all around) and at least a 10 point font. This length includes everything: figures, tables, references, appendices and so forth. Longer submissions will not be reviewed. Papers should include a title; full list of authors, their organizations and email addresses; and an abstract of fewer than 200 words. Important Dates * Submission deadline for papers June 20, 2011. * Notification to authors July 30, 2011. * Camera ready due Aug 20, 2011. * Workshop date Oct 17, 2011. Program Committee co-Chairs * Tim Griffin, Cambridge University * Boon Thau Loo, University of Pennsylvania Program Committee * Edwin Brady, University of St Andrews * Randy Bush, Internet Initiative Japan * Ana Cavalli, TELECOM SudParis * Nate Foster, Cornell University * Alexander Gurney, University of Pennsylvania * Mike Gordon, Cambridge University * Stephane Grumbach, INRIA * Ranjit Jhala, UC San Diego * Anil Madhavapeddy, Cambridge University * Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University * Matthew Roughan, University of Adelaide * Georg Struth, University of Sheffield * Walter Willinger AT&T Labs Research * Pamela Zave, AT&T Labs Research

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