Automata-Based Stream Processing

We propose an automata-theoretic framework for modularly expressing computations on streams of data. With weighted automata as a starting point, we identify three key features that are useful for an automaton model for stream processing: expressing the regular decomposition of streams whose data items are elements of a complex type (e.g., tuple of values), allowing the hierarchical nesting of several different kinds of aggregations, and specifying modularly the parallel execution and combination of various subcomputations. The combination of these features leads to subtle efficiency considerations that concern the interaction between nondeterminism, hierarchical nesting, and parallelism. We identify a syntactic restriction where the nondeterminism is unambiguous and parallel subcomputations synchronize their outputs. For automata satisfying these restrictions, we show that there is a space- and time-efficient streaming evaluation algorithm. We also prove that when these restrictions are relaxed, the evaluation problem becomes inherently computationally expensive

What is the Natural Abstraction Level of an Algorithm?

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Successor-Invariant First-Order Logic on Graphs with Excluded Topological Subgraphs

We show that the model-checking problem for successor-invariant first-order logic is fixed-parameter tractable on graphs with excluded topological subgraphs when parameterised by both the size of the input formula and the size of the exluded topological subgraph. Furthermore, we show that model-checking for order-invariant first-order logic is tractable on coloured posets of bounded width, parameterised by both the size of the input formula and the width of the poset. Our result for successor-invariant FO extends previous results for this logic on planar graphs (Engelmann et al., LICS 2012) and graphs with excluded minors (Eickmeyer et al., LICS 2013), further narrowing the gap between what is known for FO and what is known for successor-invariant FO. The proof uses Grohe and Marx's structure theorem for graphs with excluded topological subgraphs. For order-invariant FO we show that Gajarsk\'y et al.'s recent result for FO carries over to order-invariant FO