The IT Simply Works team has organised a set of multidisciplinary experts to assist in surveying key research communities about their understandings and vision of the philosophy of simplicity.

Events and interview sessions are listed beneath.

In case you are interested in conributing, please fill out the participation form and take the survey.

Collateral to the Invited Seminars at NASA Ames Research Center, at JPL in Pasadena and Irvine, which specifically addressed the aspect of simplicity in IT, we had again meetings and tailored conversations with experts at all three sites and UCLA.

This activity is still ongoing at the end of the project. It will continue as its own research project by Tiziana Margaria, Bernhard Steffen and Barry Floyd beyond the official project termination.

Invited talk and panel by Tiziana Margaria - Further interviews and thematic conversations with experts in embedded systems research and industry.

A review of the state of the project and subsequent report was conducted between Cristina Seceleanu and Tiziana Margaria.

In conjunction with SEW and FM 2011, the Formal Methods Europe General Assembly and the Springer ISSE Editorial Board meeting, further interviews and thematic conversations with experts were conducted by Barry Floyd and Tiziana Margaria. In addition, a review of the state of the project and subsequent report was conducted among Michael Hinchey, Barry Floyd, and Tiziana Margaria taking advantage of being at Dr. Hinchey's University.

As a consequence of the conversations in April at the Software Summit, individual informal expert interviews were conducted by Tiziana Margaria and Barry Floyd in Redmond, Washington, in June 2011.

In April 2011, individual informal expert interviews were conducted by Tiziana Margaria.

In March 2011, individual expert interviews at ETAPS were conducted by Bernhard Steffen.

In March 2011, focus groups and individual interviews were held in Brasil and Chile (in the special context of the German/Brazilian Year).

Individual Expert interviews at VMCAI/POPL by Bernhard Steffen led to very interesting statements.

Additional focus group meetings were conducted in Rio de Janeiro during the Executive board meeting of the Brazilian Computer Society (BCS).

Similar focus group sessions were conducted at ISSRE 2010 (San Jose, California), Kestrel institute, CMU/NASA-Ames, and SAP Palo Alto.

As prepared in task T4 we conducted interviews with leading experts in Computer Science, Software Engineering and practitioners in the IT industry during ISoLA 2010, Oct. 17-21. We held five sessions (each approximately 60-90 minutes in length) and interviewed a total number of 33 multidisciplinary experts.

To assist with the administration of the focus groups, we provided to the participants, in advance, the survey questions developed by Prof. Floyd, along with a two page document that discussed the nature of the project and its rationale. We observed that it was essential to frame the problem with clarity for the participants and to request that they prepare their thoughts prior to the actual focus group meeting. The survey questions led the focus group participants through thinking about the issues of simplicity from a personal viewpoint that then evolved from a more concrete perspective to the more abstract as follows:

• from the particular scope of the expert's own experience
• to the technologies,
• to issues and needs,
• to underlying informing principles and finally
• to definitions

We found that this approach was a simple and effective guidance for the preparation phase and, subsequently, for the meeting itself.

As a consequence of our very successful experiences in these focus group sessions, we finalized our data collection design. We continued to use this material and this structure for the subsequent interviews in the following months of the project. This consistency in interview procedure allowed easy comparability of the basic information among the interviewed groups of experts. We did not discover the need for addition information to be collected and so no additional questions were added to this core survey.

Methodologically, we recorded our conversations with the experts3 and industry participants in order to reexamine and analyze the discussion, the topics touched, and the depth in which they had been discussed.

In agreement with Prof. Mike Hinchey (a member of the editorial Board of IEEE Computer) and following preliminary correspondence with the Editor in Chief at project approval time, we have proposed to organize a special thematic issue on IT and Simplicity in the magazine.

The proposal foresees

• an introductory paper co-authored by the guest editors (T. Margaria, B. Floyd, M. Hinchey)
• 3-5 full contributions, detailing the state of the art and the needs in different domains of ICT research
• 8-10 1-page contributions by practitioners and industry researchers on related hot topics. Here we have already secured contribution by Wolfgang Kellerer (DOCOMO Munich), Wolfram Schulte (Microsoft Research, Redmond), Tiberiu Seceleanu (ABB research, Västeras – Sweden).

With its widest distribution in the engineering and ICT community worldwide, this is ensured to draw attention in the large public of researchers and professionals.

As part of the dissemination activity, Tiziana Margaria and Bernhard Steffen gave seminar talks on IT and simplicity

• at NASA AMES (Mountain View, Aug. 22 and 23 2011)
• at Jet Propulsion Lab (Pasadena, on Aug. 25)
• at University of Irvine (August 29, 2011)
• Meeting With Prof. Palsberg (UCLA) on Aug. 28th, 2011

These talks and subsequent discussions were the result of the discussions and interviews with the inviting scientists that occurred in earlier stages of the project and were both further information gathering sessions and dissemination/feedback on the findings and recommendations.

As part of the dissemination activity, Tiziana Margaria was invited to give an invited talk on IT and simplicity in embedded systems at CORCS 2011, the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Component-Based Design of Resource-Constrained System to be held in conjunction with COMPSAC, the IEEE Signature Conference on Computers, Software and Applications (COMPSAC) 2011 in Munich, Germany, July 18-22.

The 34th IEEE Software Engineering Workshop, which took place as part of the FM 2011 Week, included a Special Session Simplification Through Change of Perspective .

Tiziana Margaria gave an ITSy talk at the founding workshop of the new IFIP WG 1.9/2.4 at SRI (Menlo Park), June 2011.

ITSy was represented at the First International Workshop on Eternal Systems (EternalS 2011) on May 3rd 2011 in Budapest, the day before the European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition (FET11) in Budapest.

EternalS is the European Coordination Action on Trustworthy Eternal Systems via Evolving Software, Data and Knowledge. This action creates the conditions for mutual awareness and cross-fertilization among the 4 ICT-Forever Yours - FET projects (FP7-ICT-Call 3): LivingKnowledge, HATS, Connect and SecureChange. These projects are currently conducting research in key ICT areas:

• automatic learning of systems capable of analysing knowledge and diversity with respect to their complex semantic interactions and evolution over time (e.g. diversity of opinions due to sequences of events)
• exploitation of formal methods for the design and networking of adaptive and evolving software systems, where security policies and fully connected environment represent fundamental properties of effective present and future systems.

With technical contributions by Tiziana Margaria and Bernhard Steffen, ITSy was present in the program with topics in Software Engineering and Formal Methods, picking up in a more official setting the seed set at ISoLA 2010 during the EternalS General Assembly.

Following the invitation to the coordinators of FET projects, we submitted a proposal for a thematic session at the FET Conference and Exhibition in Budapest. Although the proposal was ultimately not accepted, we succeeded to participate at FET in the context of the ITSy concertation with the EternalS Coordination Action (see above).

ITSy was represented at the Future Internet Week in Ghent by attending the meetings, participating and networking and working to identify key experts that were significant to the ITSy perspective. Several conversations turned into de facto partial interviews.

ITSy panel meetings have taken place during the ISoLA week in October 2010.

We produced a poster that was displayed at ISoLA 2010, Oct. 17-21. It was first and foremost intended as basis of thought for the invited experts as well as to draw attention of other attendees of the symposium. Hence we chose a descriptive approach in terms of comparing the evolution of information technology to that of automotive design. This approach was inspired by the article Simplicity as a Driver for Agile Innovation in which this comparison of evolutions was introduced.

In essence, by explicitly focusing on simplicity for the end-user, automotive design has led to a simpler way of driving without the need for knowing technical insights of an automobile. At the same time this example illustrates that evolution in this particular case not only affected each field of automotive design but also the whole ecosystem and landscape as we know it now, including broader issues such as road construction and breakdown services. Altogether the viewer of the poster was motivated to share practical experience and to develop new ideas and thinking about what benefit might be derived from the establishment of a culture of simplicity in information technology design.

Have a look at the ITSy poster for ISoLA 2010

Prof. Margaria and Prof. Steffen were involved as discussants and panel impulse providers in the Oct. 1st meeting in Bruxelles on TSC – The Social Computer, an ongoing FET Flagship proposal that aims at creating "a future computational system that harnesses the innate problem solving, action and information gathering powers of humans and the environments in which they live in order to tackle large scale social problems that are beyond our current capabilities".
In alignment with the suggestion that the ITSy topic is relevant to the Flagship initiative, as a discipline-independent quality and sustainability criterion, we chose the TSC proposal as the one that most closely resembles the perspective we are taking, and as the one that most promisingly allows an integration of the quest for simplicity as an embedded cultural trait into its own aims and methods.
In accordance with the recommendations of several FET officers we joined the TSC proposal as supporters and active members of its community. The contributions to the panels at the TSC workshop are a dissemination action that provided visibility of the simplicity issue and the ITSy effort to a large number of European interdisciplinary experts.