This talk introduces a programming model that addresses the complexities of developing decentralized applications across diverse, geo-distributed infrastructures. While existing distributed systems techniques are robust, their inaccessibility often forces developers into centralized cloud dependencies. Our approach reinterprets and integrates these techniques into a cohesive framework, making decentralization a first-class programming principle. This enables developers to design applications where individual nodes operate with local autonomy (“think locally”) while seamlessly composing these views into globally consistent and verifiable behaviors (“act globally”). Furthermore, we integrate native time-evolving capabilities, allowing decentralized systems to dynamically adapt across both space and time. By combining local autonomy with global coherence, this model significantly mitigates complexity, empowering developers to build correct-by-construction distributed applications for the decentralized future.

I am a Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

My research focuses on software development paradigms and tools.

On the paradigms side, I develop programming languages to enable the visions of “software as a service (SaaS)” and “software product-lines” by providing large-scale module concepts with built-in support for adaptability and extensibility.

On the tools side, I work on intelligent software-development environments that guide developers to increase the development productivity and the software quality. Such environment leverage web-based resources to automatically generate and recommend established programming rules and patterns; they also enable architects to explicitly specify such patterns to be enforced during development.

I have (co)authored over 100 scientific publications in renowned publication venues in software engineering and programming languages. I regularly serve on steering committees, program committees, and editorial boards of top tier conferences and journals in software engineering and programming languages.