In this talk, I will introduce spatial programming, a new distributed computing model targeting highly-dynamic outdoor distributed systems. Central to spatial programming is the concept of spatial reference, which is used to virtualize the naming of a network resource with certain properties in a certain space. Using spatial references, reference consistency, space casting and access timeout, a programmer can express meaningful applications over a dynamic, physically distributed network of embedded systems. I will also describe an implementation of a spatial programming platform using Smart Messages, a lightweight mobile agent-like software architecture, which we developed for networks of embedded systems. Liviu Iftode is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1998. His research interests include distributed systems, operating systems, mobile networking and pervasive computing. Most of his work has been conducted with his students in the Distributed Computing (DISCO) Laboratory at Rutgers (http://discolab.rutgers.edu).

Liviu Iftode is the vice-chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems and a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Pervasive Computing and IEEE Distributed Systems Online. He served in numerous program committees of technical conferences. More information can be found at http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~iftode.