Daniel Jackson
Associate Director, MIT Computing and AI Lab (CSAIL), ACM Fellow
Daniel Jackson is the Associate Director of the MIT Computing and AI Lab (CSAIL) and a Professor of Computer Science. He has received the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Award and the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Research Award for his research in software, and has been named an ACM Fellow. He is the principal designer of the Alloy modeling language, has served as chair of the Software Reliability Research Program at the National Academy of Sciences, and has worked with NASA on software projects such as air traffic control, proton therapy at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Toyota self-driving cars. He is represented by Software Abstraction and Elements of Software Design.
Topic
The essence of software
Why some software products succeed and others fail is rarely clear, even with hindsight, and success involves many factors. But one factor is always necessary: a compelling usage scenario. This scenario typically doesn’t let users do something they couldn’t do before, but makes doing something they already want to do easier. I’ll give several examples of this, and then generalize this idea to thinking of software products in terms of “concepts”—small services that provide coherent value and that, while being composable, have no mutual dependences. I’ll illustrate the use of concepts in clarifying software design, and will tell you about some recent work in which concepts, due to their modular qualities, enable LLM-based generation of an entire app.
