Declarative languages allow programmers to say "what" they want, without worrying over the details of "how" to achieve it. These kinds of languages revolutionized data management decades ago (SQL, spreadsheets), but have had limited success in other aspects of computing. The story seems to be changing in recent years, however. One new chapter is work that my colleagues and I have been pursuing on the design and implementation of declarative languages and runtime systems for network protocol specification. Distributed Systems and Networking appear to be surprisingly natural domains for declarative specifications, and -- given recent interest in revisiting Internet Architecture from scratch -- these domains are ripe for a new programming methodology. The results of our first phase of research have been exciting: we have implemented complex networking infrastructure in 100x less code than traditional implementations, and our programs often match very closely (sometimes line-for-line) with psuedocode published by protocol inventors. As the work on core declarative networking has matured, a number of groups have begun pursuing related applications for declarative languages, including our own emerging work on hybrid protocol synthesis, distributed Machine Learning, and language metacompilation, as well as initial work by others on replication systems, security, distributed debugging, consensus protocols, and modular robotics. This talk will introduce the concepts of Declarative Networking, the state of the research agenda today, and new directions being pursued.

Joseph M. Hellerstein is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research focuses on data management and networking. His work has been recognized via awards including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, MIT Technology Review's inaugural TR100 list, and two ACM-SIGMOD "Test of Time" awards. Key ideas from his research have been incorporated into commercial and open-source database software released by IBM, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. He has also held industrial posts including Director of Intel Research Berkeley, and Chief Scientist of Cohera Corporation.