AGERE! 2014 Chairs' Welcome

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control (AGERE!). The latest edition of the AGERE! workshop confirms its role as a unique venue in the research landscape bringing together researchers and practitioners interested in actors, agents and, more generally, high-level paradigms emphasizing decentralized control in thinking, modeling, developing, and reasoning about programs and software systems. The fundamental turn of software into concurrency and distribution is not only a matter of performance, but also of design and abstraction. It calls for programming paradigms that, compared to current mainstream paradigms, would allow us to more naturally think about, design, develop, execute, debug, and profile systems exhibiting different degrees of concurrency, autonomy, decentralization of control, and physical distribution. AGERE! is an ACM SIGPLAN workshop dedicated to focusing on and developing research on programming systems, languages and applications based on actors, agents and any related programming paradigm promoting a decentralized mindset in solving problems and in developing systems to implement such solutions. All stages of software development are considered interesting for the workshop, including requirements, modeling, formalization, prototyping, design, implementation, tooling, testing, and any other means of producing running software based on actors and agents as first-class abstractions. The scope of the workshop includes aspects that concern both the theory and the practice of design and programming using such paradigms, so as to bring together researchers working on models, languages and technologies, as well as practitioners using such technologies to develop real-world systems and applications. The workshop was organized as a one-day workshop, integrating both: a part featuring a mini-conference style, like previous editions, reserving some time slots for the presentation and discussion of those accepted contributions that are meant to be published in the formal proceedings. a part featuring a brainstorming style, more targeted to solicit the discussion of ideas/challenges/new directions, etc. raised by the set of position/work-in-progress papers submitted to the workshop and selected by the PC. The workshop welcomed three main kinds of contributions: Mature contributions: full papers presenting new previously unpublished research in one or more of the topics of the workshop. Position papers and work-in-progress contributions: short papers introducing a contribution (an idea, a viewpoint, an argument, work-in-progress, etc.) which may be in its initial stage and not fully developed but which is worth being presented given its relevance to the AGERE! topics, to trigger discussions and interactions. Demos: these contributions describe a technology/system presented and discussed during the event. Posters: these contributions are aimed to exploit the event to discuss (with other participants) an idea and get feedback for future work. AGERE! 2014 received 14 submissions, of which 9 full papers were accepted to be included in these proceedings. Since the first edition, a main objective of the workshop has been to explore and foster the adoption of actors, agents and paradigms based on a decentralized control as a more high-level and effective alternative --- from an abstraction point of view in particular --- to mainstream approaches such as multi-threaded programming. Among others, this calls for devising technologies featuring a good level of maturity and performance. This is reflected by the contributions accepted in this edition