Monday, September 30, 2024, 3:30 – 5pm

► Courtney Miller — Ph.D. Student, Software Engineering
     — Supporting the Sustainable use of Open Source Software
          Thesis proposal practice talk

In this dissertation, I study how to support and improve the processes used by developers facing open source dependency abandonment. Open source software forms the digital infrastructure that most modern software is built on, and expectations regarding ongoing maintenance are a widespread norm despite the reality that many open source projects become abandoned, even widely-used ones. However, supporting downstream users facing potential or actual dependency abandonment is a topic that has been largely neglected by open source sustainability research. 

To address this, I shift the focus of sustainability research from maintainers to users through the identification of both the challenges developers face when dealing with dependency abandonment as well as how they currently react at scale, improving the resiliency and adaptability of open source digital infrastructure and the many software supply chains that depend on them.  I demonstrate the efficacy of information transparency in encouraging timely downstream responses, highlight the unmet need for tooling to automate the identification of dependency abandonment, and investigate when and how to inform developers while minimizing notification fatigue, thus facilitating the sustainable use of open source. 

► Chenyang Yang — Ph.D. Student, Software Engineering
     — Machine Learning in Production: A Case Study on Amazon’s Product Rankers

I will talk about my experience as an intern working on Amazon's product rankers. In the talk, I will first present my observations on what challenges industry practitioners are faced with, and connect my observations to existing software engineering research on collaboration and evaluation challenges for ML in production. Finally, I will discuss how my observations motivate the design and implementation of a well-received tool for industry practitioners.

► Jonathan Aldrich — Professor, Software and Societal Systems Department
     — The Meerkat Vision: Language Support for Live, Scalable, Reactive Web Apps

The reactive programming paradigm has become ubiquitous for modern web and mobile app development. But despite its many benefits, today reactive programming is limited to the client and to data updates, leaving to the programmer the tedious and error-prone tasks of managing updates to code and synchronizing data updates between reactive clients and a server database. In this paper, we lay out the vision for Meerkat, a multitier, reactive, and live programming language designed to scale to the needs of modern applications. We introduce the language through a chat application which runs on our prototype implementation. We then describe approaches for modularizing and scaling Meerkat programs, customizing tradeoffs between consistency and availability, supporting local-first software and rich data models, and scaling live updates to full DevOps in software organizations. The Meerkat research program will enable a new era of developing apps that are more responsive, reliable, and evolvable than ever before.
→ This is a preview / practice talk for an Onward! 2024 paper to be presented next month.  It's an example of a "vision talk/paper" for a new research project. 

In Person and Zoom/Livestream Participation.  See announcement.

Event Type: Talks
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: TCS Hall 358 and Livestream
Speaker's Name: COURTNEY MILLER, CHENYANG YANG, and JONATHAN ALDRICH
Speaker's Professional Title: Software and Societal Systems Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Three Talks
For More Information: sssg@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Series Website
Event Website URL: s3d.cmu.edu…