Otherwise, the speaker seems like a good representative, but the presentation is so verbose it makes me want to concurrently handle his thesis asynchronously in parallel threads and remove the human... in jRuby, using Celluloid.
Edit: Essentially: some actor library for language X is not even remotely (if any) erlang. Maybe cloud haskell some day will be there, but its all introspection parts is basically nonexistent right now.
I think Celluloid is neat and a great set of abstractions for multi threading in Ruby. However, there's more to actors than just having it implemented in a library. Erlang's VM was designed for the actor model whereas Ruby MRI is not. Celluloid actors run in OS threads which can't scale to hundreds of thousands where as Erlang processes can. Using Celluloid with JRuby is closer but still not quite the same.
All that said, Celluloid is damn cool and Tony Arcieri did incredible work on it.
This is untrue.
This is also why all the "Actor"(-like) libraries grafted on to other programming languages that proudly proclaim themselves "Erlang-like" are wrong and make me laugh out loud when I run across them.