The Aspect-Oriented Software Development International Conference is hitting its sixth iteration and Iowa State is taking an interesting role in its development by having two workshops chaired by ISU professors.

“It’s a bit unusual to have two workshops organized by people from the same department, especially at such a conference,” said Gary Leavens, professor of computer science. “I think it’s a good thing for the university.”

AOSD is a software program that aids programmers on issues they face, such as separating special focuses into single entities.

Leavens is the founder and organizer of a workshop titled “Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages.” His workshop has been prominently featured in every meeting of the AOSD conference, and helps bring newcomers up to speed with the fundamentals of the science.

Hridesh Rajan, assistant professor of computer science, is the co-chair of a new workshop titled “Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages” and focuses on alerting programmers and software developers to new applications of effort-saving programming techniques in different ways. Rajan was unavailable for comment.

“This is indeed a very important conference,” said Carl Chang, professor and chairman of computer science. “I think something like this proves the competence of our faculty. For people working in programming, especially those focusing in aspect-oriented programming, this is the conference to attend.”

Aspect-oriented programming is a new way of helping software designers and programmers in refining their work.

“With formal methods, it’s kind of like using mathematics to specify what programs are supposed to do,” Leavens said. “Programming language research is about designing and implementing, learning about language designs. Aspect-oriented software development is a new way of doing things that [have] come around in the past 10 years.”

Aspect-oriented software development is still a relatively new way of looking at things compared with previous methods, and the AOSD conference is still young.

“There are several important conferences we know of that have been around a lot longer. One I know of has been going on for 29 years,” Chang said.

But both Chang and Leavens are confident that this conference and way of thinking are going places. Leavens plans to continue holding his workshop, and many other people from around the world are helping him.

“It’s an emerging area, and we have many faculty studying it,” Chang said.