This is a practice-based research thesis situated in the research context of the 'Internet of Things', and critiques contemporary theoretical discourse related to the 21st century turn of connecting everyday objects to the World Wide Web. In the last decade we have seen the 'Internet of Things' articulated predominately through three commercial design fictions, each a response to the shift towards pervasive", "ubiquitous" (Weiser 1991), or "context-ware" (Schilit, 1994) computing; where we inhabit spaces with objects capable of sensing, recording and relaying data about themselves and their environments. Through reflecting upon these existing design fictions, through a new combination of theories and practice-based research that embodies them, this thesis proposes a recovery to understanding the role of objects in the 'Internet of Things', which this author believes has been lost since its conception in the mid 2000s. In 2000, HP Labs presented Cooltown, which addressed what HP identified as the 'convergence of Web technology, wireless networks, and portable client devices provides'. Cooltown's primary discourse was to provide 'new design opportunities for computer/communications systems, through an infrastructure to support "web presence" for people, places and things.' (Anders 1998; Barton & Kindberg 2002). IBM's Smarter Planet followed this in 2008 and shifted importance from the act of connecting objects to understanding the value of data as it flows between these objects in a network (Castells 1996; Sterling 2005; Latour 2005). Finally, Cisco presented The Internet of Everything in 2012 and moved the argument on one stage further, identifying that the importance of connected objects lies in the sum of their communication across silos of networks, where data can provide potential insight from which you can improve services (Bleecker 2006). Despite these design and theoretical fictions, the affordances of the Internet of Things first proposed in the mid 2000s has regressed from data to product, driven largely by unchanged discourse argued by those designers at its conception and also the enticement of being the next Google acquisition; instead of pigeons reporting on the environmental conditions of a city (Da Costa 2006), we have thermostats controllable from your smartphone (www.scottishpower.co.uk/connect). Therefore the aim of this thesis is to re-examine the initial potential of the Internet of Things, which is tested through a series of design interventions as research for art and design, (produced as part of my EPSRC funded doctoral studies on the Tales of Things and Electronic Memory research project and also whilst employed as a research assistant on two EPSRC funded research programmes of work Sixth Sense Transport, and The Connected High Street), to understand how we use data to allow an alternative discourse to emerge in order to recover the role of a networked object, rather than producing prototypical systems.

Le concept d'objet actif est un modèle de calcul puissant utilisé pour définir des systèmes distribués et concurrents. Dans ce travail, nous étudions un modèle d'objet actif sans type futur explicite et avec 'attente par nécessité', une technique qui déclenche une synchronisation sur la valeur retournée par une invocation lorsque celle-ci est strictement nécessaires. Bien que la concurrence élevée combinée à un haut niveau de transparence conduise à de bonnes performances, elles rendent le système plus propice à des problèmes comme les deadlocks. C'est la raison qui nous a conduit à étudier l'analyse de deadlocks dans ce modèle d'objets actifs. Le développement de notre analyse de les deadloks est divisé en deux travaux principaux. Dans le premier travail, nous nous concentrons sur la synchronisation implicite sur la disponibilité d'une certaine valeur. De cette façon, nous pouvons analyser la synchronisation des flux de données inhérente aux langues qui permettent une attente par nécessité. Dans le deuxième travail, nous présentons une technique d'analyse statique basée sur des effets et des types comportementaux pour dériver des modèles de synchronisation d'objets actifs et confirmant l'absence de deadlock dans ce contexte. Notre système d'effets trace l'accès aux champs d'objet, ce qui nous permet de calculer des types comportementaux qui expriment des modèles de synchronisation de manière précise. En conséquence, nous pouvons vérifier automatiquement l'absence de blocages dans des programmes basés sur des objets actifs avec des synchronisations d'attente par nécessité et des objets actifs dotés d’un état interne. / The active object concept is a powerful computational model for defining distributed and concurrent systems. This model has recently gained prominence, largely thanks to its simplicity and its abstraction level. In this work we study an active object model with no explicit future type and wait-by-necessity synchronisations, a lightweight technique that synchronises invocations when the corresponding values are strictly needed. Although high concurrency combined with a high level of transparency leads to good performances, they also make the system more prone to problems such as deadlocks. This is the reason that led us to study deadlock analysis in this active objects model.The development of our deadlock analysis is divided in two main works. In the first work we focus on the implicit synchronisation on the availability of some value. This way we are able to analyse the data-flow synchronisation inherent to languages that feature wait-by-necessity. In the second work we present a static analysis technique based on effects and behavioural types for deriving synchronisation patterns of stateful active objects and verifying the absence of deadlocks in this context. Our effect system traces the access to object fields, thus allowing us to compute behavioural types that express synchronisation patterns in a precise way. As a consequence we can automatically verify the absence of deadlocks in active object based programs with wait-by-necessity synchronisations and stateful active objects.

The last decade has seen the transition from single-core processors to multi-cores and many-cores. This move has by and large shifted the responsibility from chip manufacturers to programmers to keep up with ever-increasing expectations on performance. In the single-core era, improvements in hardware capacity could immediately be leveraged by an application: faster machine - faster program. In the age of the multi-cores, this is no longer the case. Programs must be written in specific ways to utilize available parallel hardware resources. Programming language support for concurrent and parallel programming is poor in most popular object-oriented programming languages. Shared memory, threads and locks is the most common concurrency model provided. Threads and locks are hard to understand, error-prone and inflexible; they break encapsulation - the very foundation of the object-oriented approach. This makes it hard to break large complex problems into smaller pieces which can be solved independently and composed to make a whole. Ubiquitous parallelism and object-orientation, seemingly, do not match. Actors, or active objects, have been proposed as a concurrency model better fit for object-oriented programming than threads and locks. Asynchronous message passing between actors each with a logical thread of control preserves encapsulation as objects themselves decide when messages are executed. Unfortunately most implementations of active objects do not prevent sharing of mutable objects across actors. Sharing, whether on purpose or by accident, exposes objects to multiple threads of control, destroying object encapsulation. In this thesis we show techniques for compiler-enforced isolation of active objects, while allowing sharing and zero-copy communication of mutable data in the cases where it is safe to do so. We also show how the same techniques that enforce isolation can be utilized internal to an active object to allow data race-free parallel message processing and data race-free structured parallel computations. This overcomes the coarse-grained nature of active object parallelism without compromising safety. / UPMARC

This work is aimed on creating plug-in module for the system Atlassian JIRA. The module was developed based on the requirements of real company and provided as a project corresponding with business processes. The main objective was to extend the functionality of used system and to design project delivery process modifications for projects of similar type.