Agents Laboratory

Modern software systems are often developed for parallel and distributed computers.  The Agents Laboratory addresses programming language and software engineering challenges in building such systems, by developing formal models, novel programming abstractions and their proof-of-concept implementations, and then experimentally evaluating them.  
The primary approach is based on the Actor model of concurrency, which has been used in implementing large-scale distributed systems like Twitter, and has been popularized by several new languages, libraries, and frameworks, including Erlang, Akka, and Microsoft Orleans.  Dr. Jamali is one of a handful of experts on Actors in Canada.

Official Website

Notable Research Accomplishments

Agents Lab's first PhD graduate, Xinghui Zhao, received a tenure-tract position at Washington State University (Vancouver, WA).  Master's and undergraduate researchers graduating from the lab have received research and software engineering positions in industry and academia with places including SED Systems and Canadian Light Source locally, as well with industry leaders including Google, Microsoft, and Linkedin across North America.

Research from the Agents Lab has been presented at the following conferences and/or their affiliated workshops:  Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), ACM Multimedia, IEEE/ACM Grid Computing, IEEE Mobile Services, Mobiquitous, IEEE Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO), IEEE International Green Computing Conference (IGCC), ACM Systems, ACM Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH), IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) and International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

Current Research Projects

  • Middleware for crowd-sourced services
  • Coordinating complex communications
  • Sender-side incentives for message prioritization
  • Distributed resource brokering
  • Programming language support for distributed simulation

Faculty

  • Dr. Nadeem Jamali