Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts offer a whole new set of collaborative tools that allow new approaches to market research, in order to explore continuously and ever fast-growing social and media environments. Simultaneously, the exponential growth of online social networks, along with a combination of computer-based tools, is contributing to the construction of new kinds of research communities, in which respondents interact with researchers as well as with each other. Furthermore, by studying the networks, researchers are able to manage multiple data sources - user-generated contents. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a new concept of Distributed Informal Information Systems for Innovation that arises from the interaction of the accumulated stock of knowledge emerging at the individual (micro) level. A descriptive study is to unveil and report when and how market research professionals use social networks for their work, creating, therefore, distributed information systems for innovation.

This paper presents a type system to control the migration of code between nodes in a concurrent distributed framework, using Dπ. We express resource policies with types and enforce them via a type system. Sites are organised hierarchically in subnetworks that share the same security policies, statically specified by a network administrator. The type system guarantees that, at runtime, there are no security policies violations.

We define a language whose type system, incorporating session types, allows complex protocols to be specified by types and verified by static typechecking. A session type, associated with a communication channel, specifies not only the data types of individual messages, but also the state transitions of a protocol and hence the allowable sequences of messages. Although session types are well understood in the context of the π-calculus, our formulation is based on λ-calculus with side-effecting input/output operations and is different in significant ways. Our typing judgements statically describe dynamic changes in the types of channels, our channel types statically track aliasing, and our function types not only specify argument and result types but also describe changes in channel types. After formalising the syntax, semantics and typing rules of our language, and proving a subject reduction theorem, we outline some possibilities for extending this work to a concurrent object-oriented language.

We present the approach to teaching object-oriented concepts that we have adopted almost three years ago. Our integrated effort spreads over three one-semester courses, incorporated in a four year long undergraduate course, and is based on an objects-first approach coupled with contract-guided system development. Our aim is that students learn the fundamental skills to construct correct, robust, reuseable and extensible software systems. Some preliminary conclusions are presented.

Session types support a type-theoretic formulation of struc- tured patterns of communication, so that the communication behaviour of agents in a distributed system can be verified by static type checking. Applications include network protocols, business processes, and operat- ing system services. The theory of session types has been studied exten- sively for the pi calculus and related languages, to a lesser extent for functional languages, and more recently for object oriented languages. In this paper we define a multithreaded functional language with session types, which unifies, simplifies and extends previous work. There are three main contributions. First: manipulating sessions by means of the standard structures of a linear type theory, rather than by means of new forms of typing judgement. Second: presenting an operational seman- tics with buered channels, instead of the synchronous communication of previous work. Third: including subtyping between session types, the first time that this has been done in a setting other than the pi calculus. Our new approach significantly simplifies session types in the functional setting, clarifies their essential features, and provides a secure foundation for further developments such as polymorphism and object-orientation. Keywords: Session types, functional programming, typechecking, se- mantics, distributed programming, specification of communication pro- tocols.