Changing a semantics: opportunism or courage?

The generalized models for higher-order logics introduced by Leon Henkin, and their multiple offspring over the years, have become a standard tool in many areas of logic. Even so, discussion has persisted about their technical status, and perhaps even their conceptual legitimacy. This paper gives a systematic view of generalized model techniques, discusses what they mean in mathematical and philosophical terms, and presents a few technical themes and results about their role in algebraic representation, calibrating provability, lowering complexity, understanding fixed-point logics, and achieving set-theoretic absoluteness. We also show how thinking about Henkin's approach to semantics of logical systems in this generality can yield new results, dispelling the impression of adhocness. This paper is dedicated to Leon Henkin, a deep logician who has changed the way we all work, while also being an always open, modest, and encouraging colleague and friend.Comment: 27 pages. To appear in: The life and work of Leon Henkin: Essays on his contributions (Studies in Universal Logic) eds: Manzano, M., Sain, I. and Alonso, E., 201

Matching Logic

This paper presents matching logic, a first-order logic (FOL) variant for specifying and reasoning about structure by means of patterns and pattern matching. Its sentences, the patterns, are constructed using variables, symbols, connectives and quantifiers, but no difference is made between function and predicate symbols. In models, a pattern evaluates into a power-set domain (the set of values that match it), in contrast to FOL where functions and predicates map into a regular domain. Matching logic uniformly generalizes several logical frameworks important for program analysis, such as: propositional logic, algebraic specification, FOL with equality, modal logic, and separation logic. Patterns can specify separation requirements at any level in any program configuration, not only in the heaps or stores, without any special logical constructs for that: the very nature of pattern matching is that if two structures are matched as part of a pattern, then they can only be spatially separated. Like FOL, matching logic can also be translated into pure predicate logic with equality, at the same time admitting its own sound and complete proof system. A practical aspect of matching logic is that FOL reasoning with equality remains sound, so off-the-shelf provers and SMT solvers can be used for matching logic reasoning. Matching logic is particularly well-suited for reasoning about programs in programming languages that have an operational semantics, but it is not limited to this

On the uniform one-dimensional fragment

The uniform one-dimensional fragment of first-order logic, U1, is a recently introduced formalism that extends two-variable logic in a natural way to contexts with relations of all arities. We survey properties of U1 and investigate its relationship to description logics designed to accommodate higher arity relations, with particular attention given to DLR_reg. We also define a description logic version of a variant of U1 and prove a range of new results concerning the expressivity of U1 and related logics

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Dual Logic Concepts based on Mathematical Morphology in Stratified Institutions: Applications to Spatial Reasoning

Several logical operators are defined as dual pairs, in different types of logics. Such dual pairs of operators also occur in other algebraic theories, such as mathematical morphology. Based on this observation, this paper proposes to define, at the abstract level of institutions, a pair of abstract dual and logical operators as morphological erosion and dilation. Standard quantifiers and modalities are then derived from these two abstract logical operators. These operators are studied both on sets of states and sets of models. To cope with the lack of explicit set of states in institutions, the proposed abstract logical dual operators are defined in an extension of institutions, the stratified institutions, which take into account the notion of open sentences, the satisfaction of which is parametrized by sets of states. A hint on the potential interest of the proposed framework for spatial reasoning is also provided.Comment: 36 page