Alexandra Silva (University College London, UK): An algebraic framework to reason about concurrency.
Joint ICE-TCS/GSSI Virtual seminars
Schedule: 6 November 2020, at 15:00 GMT
Virtual link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86364318105?pwd=anJ2bjc1elpnRi82dC9DVmhBUVRPZz09
Speaker: Alexandra Silva (University College London, UK) WWW: https://alexandrasilva.org/#/main.html
Title: An algebraic framework to reason about concurrency
Abstract: Kleene algebra with tests (KAT) is an algebraic framework for reasoning about the control flow of sequential programs. Hoare, Struth, and collaborators proposed a concurrent extension of Kleene Algebra (CKA) as a first step towards developing algebraic reasoning for concurrent programs. Completing their research program and extending KAT to encompass concurrent behaviour has however proven to be more challenging than initially expected. The core problem appears because when generalising KAT to reason about concurrent programs, axioms native to KAT in conjunction with expected axioms for reasoning about concurrency lead to an unexpected equation about programs. In this talk, we will revise the literature on CKA(T) and explain the challenges and solutions in the development of an algebraic framework for concurrency.
The talk is based on a series of papers joint with Tobias Kappé, Paul Brunet, Bas Luttik, Jurriaan Rot, Jana Wagemaker, and Fabio Zanasi. Detailed references can be found on the CoNeCo project website: https://coneco-project.org/.
Short bio
Alexandra Silva is a theoretical computer scientist whose main research focuses on semantics of programming languages and modular development of algorithms for computational models. A lot of her work uses the unifying perspective offered by coalgebra, a mathematical framework established in the last decades.
Alexandra is currently a Professor of Algebra, Semantics, and Computation at University College London. Previously, she was an assistant professor in Nijmegen and a post-doc at Cornell University, with Prof. Dexter Kozen, and a PhD student at the Dutch national research center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), under the supervision of Prof. Jan Rutten and Dr. Marcello Bonsangue.
She was the recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Award 2019, Needham Award 2018, the Presburger Award 2017, the Leverhulme prize 2016, and an ERC starting Grant in 2015.
