Saturday, November 2, 2013

York Doctoral Symposium 2013

This week we had a local York Doctoral Symposium (YDS) which has been taking part in The University of York since 6 years ago. It was a very nice event in which several works in the form of full papers and extended abstracts in different areas of Computer Science and Electronics were presented, and despite the fact of being a local symposium it received several works not only from The University of York colleagues, but also from other UK Universities, even one paper from a German one !!

Regarding my interests (better said area of knowledge, because there were other very interesting topics) there were only a couple of papers related to Model-Driven Engineering: one of them presented by one colleague in the Enterprise Systems group, Athanasios Zolotas, related to DSLs for Web Application Development Processes; and a second one presented by me :), from which I must confess that I received an unexpected surprise at the end of the night...



The symposium was also complemented with a posters session, a very interesting keynote about the future technology, having a central focus on big data by Prof. Rashik Pamar, even a great Industry panel discussion in which several Industry sponsors representatives were replying audience questions, such as, trying to explain how these companies do research, recruitment, programmes, etc.

About the paper I presented, it was titled "Automatic Application of Visitors to Evolving Domain-Specific Languages", which tried to explain some basic concepts around model behaviours, the problem of (meta-)models (co-)evolution what respects the behaviour, and how an Object Oriented Programing software design pattern, called Visitor, can help DSLs to address some problems. As a contribution to the community, a prototype (called Visitors Generation Framework) to automatically apply the visitor pattern to any arbitrary Ecore-based DSL is explained.

To be honest, I must admit that the paper was originally rejected in a more important international workshop about model evolution, but providing that this was a side work focused on an specific implementation part, on which the more interesting researching work relies, my supervisor and me decided to simply incorporate some of the feedback we received from the former reviewers and send it to the symposium. We also agreed that it could be a great opportunity to improve my spoken English, presentation skills, etc which I have no doubt they need much more practicing.

We not only received a good feedback about how the paper was written, structured, and how the original issues were explained and solved, but also, after the symposium dinner, we were noticed and awarded with the best full paper prize! A great, as same as unexpected, new in the end of the long day.


Likewise, the Enterprise Systems group had another great new, since Thanos was also awarded with the best full paper presentation of the day.

By the way, I´ve uploaded the presentation to slideshare. You may have access to the slides here, and to conclude this blog entry I would like to thank Richard Paige for his continuous motivation and help on this work, as well as to the YDS organization to bring us a fantastic event.

1 comment:

  1. It's good to know that your lecture went alright, and congratulations for the eventual surprise! =)

    ReplyDelete