CS SEMINAR

Software Heritage: a common infrastructure for Software Engineering and Open Science

Speaker
Professor Roberto Di Cosmo, University Paris Diderot
Chaired by
Dr Stephane BRESSAN, Associate Professor, School of Computing
steph@comp.nus.edu.sg

10 Jul 2019 Wednesday, 02:00 PM to 03:30 PM

Video Conference Room, COM1-02-13

Abstract:

Software is at the heart of our digital society and embodies a growing part of our scientific, technical and organisational knowledge. Software Heritage is an open non-profit initiative whose mission is to ensure that this precious body of knowledge will be preserved over time and made available to all. We do this for multiple reasons. To preserve the scientific and technological knowledge embedded in software source code. To allow better software development and reuse for society and industry. To foster better science, building the infrastructure for preserving, sharing and referencing research software, a stepping stone for reproducibility, and a necessary complement to Open Access. We do this now, because we are at a turning point: the founding fathers are still around, and willing to contribute their knowledge, but only for a limited time. And we face the risk of massive lossage of source code developed by the Free and Open Source community, with code hosting sites that shut down when their popularity decreases. We have already collected over 5 billions unique source files from over 88 millions repositories, and organised them into a giant Merkle graph, with full deduplication across all repositories. This allows us to cope with the growth of collaborative software development, and provides a unique vantage point for observing its evolution. Now we call on all stakeholders, from individuals to companies, from public to private entities, to contribute actively to this mission.


Biodata:

After obtaining a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Pisa, Roberto Di Cosmo was an associate professor for almost a decade at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and became a Computer Science full professor at University Paris Diderot in 1999. He is currently on leave at Inria. He has been actively involved in research in theoretical computing, specifically in functional programming, parallel and distributed programming, the semantics of programming languages, type systems, rewriting and linear logic. His main focus is now on the new scientific problems posed by the general adoption of Free Software, with a particular focus on static analysis of large software collections, that were at the core of the european reseach project Mancoosi. Following the evolution of our society under the impact of IT with great interest, he is a long term Free Software advocate, contributing to its adoption since 1998 with the best-seller Hijacking the world, seminars, articles and software. He created the Free Software thematic group of Systematic in October 2007, and since 2010 he is director of IRILL, a research structure dedicated to Free and Open Source Software quality. In 2016, he co-founded and directs Software Heritage, an initiative to build the universal archive of all the source code publicly available.