Extreme lattices and vexillar designs

We define a notion of vexillar design for the flag variety in the spirit of the spherical designs introduced by Delsarte, Goethals and Seidel. For a finite subgroup of the orthogonal group, we explain how conditions on the group have the orbits of any flag under the group action be a design and point out why the minima of a lattice in the sense of the general Hermite constant forming a 4-design implies being extreme. The reasoning proves useful to show the extremality of many new expected examples ($E_8$, \La_{24}, Barnes-Wall lattices, Thompson-Smith lattice for instance) that were out of reach until now.Comment: 16page

Efficient and Reasonable Object-Oriented Concurrency

Making threaded programs safe and easy to reason about is one of the chief difficulties in modern programming. This work provides an efficient execution model for SCOOP, a concurrency approach that provides not only data race freedom but also pre/postcondition reasoning guarantees between threads. The extensions we propose influence both the underlying semantics to increase the amount of concurrent execution that is possible, exclude certain classes of deadlocks, and enable greater performance. These extensions are used as the basis an efficient runtime and optimization pass that improve performance 15x over a baseline implementation. This new implementation of SCOOP is also 2x faster than other well-known safe concurrent languages. The measurements are based on both coordination-intensive and data-manipulation-intensive benchmarks designed to offer a mixture of workloads.Comment: Proceedings of the 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE '15). ACM, 201

Teaching Software Engineering through Robotics

This paper presents a newly-developed robotics programming course and reports the initial results of software engineering education in robotics context. Robotics programming, as a multidisciplinary course, puts equal emphasis on software engineering and robotics. It teaches students proper software engineering -- in particular, modularity and documentation -- by having them implement four core robotics algorithms for an educational robot. To evaluate the effect of software engineering education in robotics context, we analyze pre- and post-class survey data and the four assignments our students completed for the course. The analysis suggests that the students acquired an understanding of software engineering techniques and principles