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SUMMARY:The Abstraction Trap: Lessons from a Career in the Memory Trenches
DTSTART:20260429T140000
DTEND:20260429T150000
DTSTAMP:20260428T001425Z
UID:18596106e47e0410a1d8c987c32d5add8eacc8b497257bfa8df16601
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By Prof. Steve Balckburn\n\nAbstract\nWhy do some foundational
  technologies advance rapidly while others seem frozen in time? For twenty
  years\, production garbage collectors have remained remarkably stagnant
 —not for a lack of great ideas\, but for a lack of the right abstraction
 s. In this talk\, I reflect on a career spent navigating the friction betw
 een theory and deployment.  I will explore how high-level abstractions—
 from strict encapsulation to the "workpacket" model—catalyze the innovat
 ion necessary to disrupt an industry status quo. Using the MMTk framework 
 as a case study\, I'll show how these architectural foundations enabled th
 e development of systems like LXR that significantly outperform the state-
 of-the-art.  However\, innovation is only half the battle. Drawing from 
 recent experiences productizing MMTk for OpenJDK\, Julia\, and Ruby\, I wi
 ll reveal the hidden impediments to taking even the most promising ideas t
 o production. I will discuss how decades of abstraction leakage in product
 ion codebases create a substantial barrier to entry for new ideas.  I'll 
 also discuss the difficulty of motivating adoption when a lack of appropri
 ate methodology causes the true costs of incumbent systems to be underesti
 mated or entirely misunderstood. While this talk draws on the world of me
 mory management\, it is not a talk about garbage collection. It is a refle
 ction on the struggle to innovate within established fields and a roadmap 
 for using foundational abstractions to clear the way for the next generati
 on of software.\n\n \n\nBio\nSteve Blackburn is a Senior Staff Research S
 cientist at Google DeepMind\, a professor at the Australian National Unive
 rsity and an ACM Fellow.  Steve has a long history in systems and program
 ming languages with a particular interest in management and performance an
 alysis. His current research includes hardware and software garbage collec
 tion for the fleet and mobile devices\; applying AI to large scale softwar
 e engineering tasks\; and understanding and mitigating silent data corrupt
 ion.\n\nMore information\n 
LOCATION:BC 410 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20410
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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