Topics of keen interest to me ... how about you?

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

At the Balisage conference someone said:

      There needs to be a shift in programming: 
      programming must be secondary and data 
      must be primary.

I knew that. But I appreciated the reminder. It's easy to forget.

The topic is of keen interest to me. Reduce the amount of "telling the computer what to do," expand the amount of "here is some data."

I am keenly interested in data-driven programming. Create small programs that are driven by their input data. Change the input data, no change to the program.

I am keenly interested in assessing input data based on its complexity (in the formal language sense). Is the input data expressing a regular language? A context-free language? A recursive language? A recursively enumerable language?

      MIT quantum computing professor Scott Aaronson
      says [1]: "By any objective standard, the theory of 
      computational complexity ranks as one of the greatest
      intellectual achievements of humankind -- along with
      fire, the wheel, and computability theory."

I am keenly interested in understanding the implication of mismatches between the complexity of input languages and the computational power of input processors. If the input language is a regular language and its input processor is Turing complete, what are the implications? Any security implications? Could mismatches be exploited to do harm?

So, I am keenly interested in:

- How to design input languages and input-processing programs to create data-driven applications.

- Assessing the complexity of input languages; specifically, the complexity of XML vocabularies.

- Understanding the implications of a mismatch between the complexity of the input language and the computational power of the input processor.

Are these topics of interest to you? 

Have you done work in these areas?

Let's change the world.

/Roger

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aaronson/dp/0521199565/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376230884&sr=1-1&keywords=scott+aaronson