Milt Capps
Published Monday, August 11, 2008 5:23 pm

Nashville's community of thought-leading experts in computer-languages, systems integration and software design and development is often undercounted or overlooked in national technology surveys.

This, despite Nashville's deep concentration of influential engineering scientists -- and a steady stream of major scientific events, regularly held in Music City.

For example, during Oct. 19-23 more than 1,000 computer-language researchers and scholars will descend upon the Nashville Convention Center for OOPSLA.

For the uninitiated, OOPSLA is the Association for Computing Machinery's major annual gathering for those who explore the object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications that play vital roles in enabling the world's high-tech infrastructure to function.

Vanderbilt University School of Engineering's Professor Janos Sztipanovits (at left) holds one of the coveted keynote-speaker slots for the OOPSLA event.  He is Vanderbilt Engineering's E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering and a professor of electrical engineering and computer engineering.

Sztipanovits is also director of the Vanderbilt-based Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS), where a steady stream of research has been stirring-up the scientific world for years, though few Nashvillians have any idea it's here. ISIS will celebrate its 10th Anniversary on Sept.19.

ISIS research sponsors are many and diverse, including Oak Ridge National Laboratories, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, DARPA, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Boeing, Cisco, Daimler Chrysler, IBM, Honeywell, General Motors, Symantech, United Technologies, Siemens and many others.

Asked about the unprecedented OOPSLA event, Sztipanovits assured VNC the event is really just the tip of the iceberg. For example, on Oct. 22 Vanderbilt will host a visit and lecture by a co-winner of ACM's A.M. Turing Award -- which Sztipanovits describes as  "roughly the Nobel Prize of Computer Science":  Dr. Joseph Sifakis of the University of Grenoble, France.

Also this fall, VUSE will host a National Science Foundation-funded conference on secure systems design, a program of partnership called the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST), which includes Vanderbilt, UC-Berkeley, Cornell, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. Within the TRUST hierarchy Sztipanovits also leads a working group addressing security in electronic medical records and related systems.

Nor is all this activity new trend.  Sztipanovits noted that a year ago ISIS hosted MODELS 07, ACM's international conference on using models in engineering languages and systems.

Note: Sztipanovits' OOPSLA keynote presentation will address challenges of engineering and integrating increasingly complex systems, through use of new model-based tools and techniques that help overcome waste in design and development, as well as fragmentation and inefficiencies of components within systems. ♦