Towards rapid development of trusted and scalable applications with built-in resilience and privacy

Abstract: New services in the digitalized society are often enabled by sophisticated software systems. To be able to trust and rely on such software systems, they need to satisfy several important requirements. First, systems need to be resilient: no service outages must occur despite occasional hardware failures in data centres or network infrastructure. Second, certain systems must provide high availability and ensure low-latency access to services. Third, systems must comply with privacy legislation such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). It is often costly or even unsustainable to reinvent solutions to these challenges for each monolithic software system, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The objective of our research is to develop reusable solutions to the above challenges by means of novel programming models and frameworks that can be used to build a wide range of applications. Specifically, the developed programming frameworks aim to provide resiliency through replication even in decentralized settings (without a central cloud). Data consistency should be ensured while enabling high availability. Finally, our frameworks aim to enable applications that by construction comply with new privacy laws such as GDPR. Target applications and services include proximity tracking, traffic analysis and live flow control, vehicle fleet management, machine learning model serving, live IoT data collection and telemetry, collaborative editing software, secure multi-party computation and live statistics and monitoring of medical data such as private health records. I will present some of our recent research results that constitute progress towards our objectives, and outline a vision for future work.

Bio: Philipp Haller is an associate professor in the Division of Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), EECS, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. His main research interests are in the design and implementation of programming languages, type systems, concurrency, and distributed programming. He was part of the team that received the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for the development of the Scala language. He is a member of the founder’s circle of Lightbend, Inc. (formerly Typesafe, Inc.), a start-up company developing and supporting Scala as well as frameworks for large-scale distributed programming. Prior to Lightbend, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, USA, and at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his Dipl.-Inform. degree in 2006 from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), his PhD in computer science in 2010 from EPFL, and his Docent title in 2018 from KTH. He is a keynote speaker for the next International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (ISPDC) in 2021.