What makes objects fly, bounce, and break?

By Prof. Walid Taha

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) have the potential for enabling revolutionary advances in many disciplines.  A pressing question for CPS is what constitutes an object in our physical world.  In programming languages, the notion of object oriented (OO) programming has received significant attention and is getting to the point where many of the hard questions are considered to be solved.  This year, the main conference on OO, OOPSLA, is renamed to SPLASH, to reflect a change of focus to a post-OO world.  We believe that for CPS the question of "what is an object" is more challenging, because we are concerned not only
with conceptual objects but models of objects in the real world.

In this talk, we reflect on some of the key technical problems relating to this question, and attempt to articular some of the properties that we may desire in such a notion.