- June 21, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway
- as part of the STAF conference
- Given the current global situation of the pandemic and the restrictions still in place, Bx@STAF 2021 will run virtually.
Bidirectional transformations (bx) are a mechanism for maintaining the consistency between two or more related (and heterogeneous) sources of information (i.e., relational databases, software models and code, or any other artefacts following standard or domain-specific formats). The strongest argument in favour of bx is its ability to provide a synchronization mechanism that is guaranteed to be correct by construction. Bx has been attracting a wide range of research areas and communities, with prominent presence at top conferences in several different fields (namely databases, programming languages, software engineering, and graph transformation). Nowadays, the fast-growing complexity of software- or data-intensive systems has forced the industry and the academy to use and investigate different development techniques to manage the many different aspects of the systems. Researchers are actively investigating the use of bidirectional approaches to tackle a diverse set of challenges with various applications including model-driven software development, visualization with direct manipulation, big data, databases, domain-specific languages, serializers, and data transformation, integration and exchange. Bx 2021 is a dedicated venue for bx in all relevant fields and is part of a workshop series that was created in order to promote cross-disciplinary research and awareness in the area. As such, since its beginning in 2012, the workshop has rotated between venues in different fields.
Keynote
We are happy to announce our keynote speaker: Edward Kmett.
Title: A Taste of Linear Optics
Abstract: Recent work on Linear Haskell gives us a vocabulary for a simple linear logic. We'll bootstrap a stronger linear logic on top of this foundation using a variation of an encoding of linear logic due to Mike Shulman.
Profunctor optics can be built on top of any symmetric monoidal category. Now having built one, we can explore the somewhat changed relationships between different types of optics in both the "simple" linear haskell and in this "full" intuitionistic linear logic setting where we have more connectives, and explore how they compare to the usual notion of lenses and other optics we can encode in Haskell.
Bio: Edward Kmett is a researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and serves as a Senior Technical Advisor at Groq. He's a member of the board of the Haskell Foundation and of the Topos Institute. Within this community he's probably best known for helping to popularize lenses and prisms through the Haskell 'lens' library.
The last time he was invited to an event by the Bx community he nearly froze to death without a jacket in -40° weather when he was chased into the snow by a moose. The irony that this happened a few short hours after chiding a couple of other attendees about planning on going on a hike without their gloves is not lost on him. This time he'll be attending remotely from California, which should significantly reduce the risk of moose attack.
Aim and Topics
The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners, established and new, interested in bx from different perspectives, including but not limited to:
- bidirectional programming languages and frameworks
- software development with bx
- data and model synchronization
- view updating
- inter-model consistency analysis and repair
- data/schema (or model/metamodel) co-evolution
- coupled software/model transformations
- inversion of transformations and data exchange mappings
- domain-specific languages for bx
- analysis and classification of requirements for bx
- bridging the gap between formal concepts and application scenarios
- analysis of efficiency of transformation algorithms and benchmarks
- model-driven and model-based approaches
- survey and comparison of bx technologies
- case studies and tool support
Contact
In case of questions, please contact the PC chairs at gro.riahcysae|1202xb#gro.riahcysae|1202xb .