Programming models play a key role providing abstractions of the underlying architecture and systems to the application developer and enabling the exploitation of the computing resources possibilities from a suitable programming interface. When considering complex systems with aspects such as large scale, distribution, heterogeneity, variability, etc. it is indeed more important to offer programming paradigms that simplify the life of the programmers while still providing competitive performance results. StarSs (Star superscalar) is a task-based family of programming models that is based on the idea of writing sequential code which is executed in parallel at run-time taking into account the data dependencies between tasks. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/sc15-invited-talk-spotlight-dr-rosa-badia/.