Understanding modal fixpoint logics
Staff - Faculty of Informatics
Start date: 19 December 2014
End date: 20 December 2014
The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Alessandro Facchini
DATE: Friday, December 19th, 2014
PLACE: USI Lugano campus, room A13, Red Building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 09.30
ABSTRACT:
Modal fixpoint logics constitute a very lively and interesting research field. The reasons of this success are twofold. On the one hand, computer scientists extensively use these formalisms to capture the relevant formal aspects of the system they want to build, as it is the case with LTL, CTL and PDL in software verification, or with conditional and regular XPath in database theory. On the other hand, the mathematical theory of modal fixpoint logics has unveiled deep and rich connections with fields as diverse as automata theory, topology, and game theory. But despite this success story, the actual situation is paradoxical: modal fixpoints are used everywhere in computer science, but the working computer scientist is still lacking a clear mathematical understanding of them.
In this talk I present the content of my present research program, whose goal is to make a step towards the understanding of the mathematical landscape behind modal fixpoints by studying expressiveness and structural problems of this formalisms, and in particular of the modal mu-calculus. Some of the last results in this direction has been presented at LICS 2013 and LICS 2014. In the final part of the talk, some challenging issues concerning quantitative extensions of the modal mu-calculus will be presented.
BIO:
From 2012 until 2014, Alessandro Facchini was assistant professor at the Informatics Institute of the University of Warsaw, where he was leading a Homing Plus project on the expressiveness of fixpoint logics, awarded by the FNP and financed by the European Union "Grants for Innovation".
After studying logic, linguistics and mathematics at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Barcelona, he has obtained a PhD in Computer Science joint from the Universities of Bordeaux 1 (LaBRI) and Lausanne, under the supervision of Igor Walukiewicz and Jacques Duparc. For the results obtained during his doctoral studies, he was awarded of the Paul Bernays Award 2011. He has been research associate at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam (EU FP7 FOX project), and visiting researcher at the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, University of California Santa Cruz, at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam, and at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh. He is also research associate at the UMR7597, CNRS-University Paris 7.
HOST: Prof. Natasha Sharygina
