Reminder: Talk Today 11AM on "The Myth and Reality of Web Services Composition" by Biplav Srivastava of IBM research 4/23 11AM BY 510

["Subbarao Kambhampati" <rao@asu.edu>]

 Title:
   The Myth and Reality of Web Services Composition

 Speaker:
   Dr. Biplav Srivastava
   IBM Research

 Time: 11AM--12AM; Wednesday April 23rd; BY 510

 Abstract:

 Divide-and-conquer or working with complex systems from their
 basic building blocks is one of the basic tenets of modern engineering.
 While its applicability to Information Technology has always been
 felt – example Object Oriented Methodology, its success has been
 limited. There is a resurgence of interest in componentization of
 IT systems and services through focus on Service Oriented Architecture,
 and Web Services as its most popular form. Consequently, Web Services
 has received wide attention in both academia and IT industry over
 the past 5-7 years. The attractiveness of this technology lies in
 the fact that the specifications of the building
 blocks (i.e., services) are openly available in a registry and
 so are the building blocks themselves. So, the promise is that a user
 can build (or modify) an application by composing (or re-composing)
 components whose specification it discovers from the registry
 and whose capabilities it can access whenever needed. Depending on
 what is defined as a service, web services composition can enable
 many IT issues -- Mashups, Asset Reuse, Business-to-IT alignment,
 Business-to-Business and Enterprise Application Integration, ...

 In this talk, we will look at where the hardness of automatically
 composing web services comes from in practice and how traditional
 Computer Science techniques (notably planning) have fared. While
 the original myth was that composition would be hard, in reality,
 most composition scenarios did not demand scalability of the
 top-of-the-line planning algorithms. However, what has turned
 out to be harder than composition is how to set up the composition
 problem as a traditional Computer Science (notably planning) problem.
 Two trends are emerging to address this: the composition problem is
 often cast as a plan reuse and modification problem in the context of
 richer domain models (e.g., Industry Business Processes), and new
 composition/ planning paradigms like model-lite planning which are
 resilient to impoverished domain models.

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 About Biplav:

 Dr. Biplav Srivastava is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research since
 February 2001. Though based at IBM's India Research Laboratory, Biplav
 is on assignment to IBM's T.J.Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY, USA.
 Biplav's research interests are in planning, scheduling, policies,
 learning and information management, and their practical applications
 in services -- infrastructure and software (web services), semantic web,
 autonomic computing and societal domains. Prior to IBM Research, he
 was Core Technology Architect at an erstwhile Silicon Valley
 start-up, Bodha, eventually acquired by SAP (2000-2001; process integration),
 Staff Software Engineer at VLSI/ Philips Semiconductors (1996-2000;
 electornic design automation) and Assistant System Analyst at TCS,
 India (1993-1994).