324,125 research outputs found
A Note About the Semantics of Delegation
In many applications, mobile agents are used by a client to delegate a task. This task is usually performed by the agent on behalf of the client, by visiting various service provider's sites distributed over a network. This use of mobile agents raises many interesting security issues concerned with the trust relationships established through delegation mechanisms between client and agent, agent and service provider and client and service provider. In this paper we will explain why the traditional semantics of delegation used by existing access control mechanisms, either centralised or distributed, are generally not satisfactory to prevent and detect deception and why these problems are even more critical when these semantics are used in mobile agent paradigms.Non peer reviewe
What does semantic tiling of the cortex tell us about semantics?
Recent use of voxel-wise modeling in cognitive neuroscience suggests that semantic maps tile the cortex. Although this impressive research establishes distributed cortical areas active during the conceptual processing that underlies semantics, it tells us little about the nature of this processing. While mapping concepts between Marr's computational and implementation levels to support neural encoding and decoding, this approach ignores Marr's algorithmic level, central for understanding the mechanisms that implement cognition, in general, and conceptual processing, in particular. Following decades of research in cognitive science and neuroscience, what do we know so far about the representation and processing mechanisms that implement conceptual abilities? Most basically, much is known about the mechanisms associated with: (1) features and frame representations, (2) grounded, abstract, and linguistic representations, (3) knowledge-based inference, (4) concept composition, and (5) conceptual flexibility. Rather than explaining these fundamental representation and processing mechanisms, semantic tiles simply provide a trace of their activity over a relatively short time period within a specific learning context. Establishing the mechanisms that implement conceptual processing in the brain will require more than mapping it to cortical (and sub-cortical) activity, with process models from cognitive science likely to play central roles in specifying the intervening mechanisms. More generally, neuroscience will not achieve its basic goals until it establishes algorithmic-level mechanisms that contribute essential explanations to how the brain works, going beyond simply establishing the brain areas that respond to various task conditions
Positive Logic with Adjoint Modalities: Proof Theory, Semantics and Reasoning about Information
We consider a simple modal logic whose non-modal part has conjunction and
disjunction as connectives and whose modalities come in adjoint pairs, but are
not in general closure operators. Despite absence of negation and implication,
and of axioms corresponding to the characteristic axioms of (e.g.) T, S4 and
S5, such logics are useful, as shown in previous work by Baltag, Coecke and the
first author, for encoding and reasoning about information and misinformation
in multi-agent systems. For such a logic we present an algebraic semantics,
using lattices with agent-indexed families of adjoint pairs of operators, and a
cut-free sequent calculus. The calculus exploits operators on sequents, in the
style of "nested" or "tree-sequent" calculi; cut-admissibility is shown by
constructive syntactic methods. The applicability of the logic is illustrated
by reasoning about the muddy children puzzle, for which the calculus is
augmented with extra rules to express the facts of the muddy children scenario.Comment: This paper is the full version of the article that is to appear in
the ENTCS proceedings of the 25th conference on the Mathematical Foundations
of Programming Semantics (MFPS), April 2009, University of Oxfor
Belief Semantics of Authorization Logic
Authorization logics have been used in the theory of computer security to
reason about access control decisions. In this work, a formal belief semantics
for authorization logics is given. The belief semantics is proved to subsume a
standard Kripke semantics. The belief semantics yields a direct representation
of principals' beliefs, without resorting to the technical machinery used in
Kripke semantics. A proof system is given for the logic; that system is proved
sound with respect to the belief and Kripke semantics. The soundness proof for
the belief semantics, and for a variant of the Kripke semantics, is mechanized
in Coq
A Denotational Semantics for Communicating Unstructured Code
An important property of programming language semantics is that they should
be compositional. However, unstructured low-level code contains goto-like
commands making it hard to define a semantics that is compositional. In this
paper, we follow the ideas of Saabas and Uustalu to structure low-level code.
This gives us the possibility to define a compositional denotational semantics
based on least fixed points to allow for the use of inductive verification
methods. We capture the semantics of communication using finite traces similar
to the denotations of CSP. In addition, we examine properties of this semantics
and give an example that demonstrates reasoning about communication and jumps.
With this semantics, we lay the foundations for a proof calculus that captures
both, the semantics of unstructured low-level code and communication.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2015, arXiv:1503.0437
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