An automaton over data words that captures EMSO logic

We develop a general framework for the specification and implementation of systems whose executions are words, or partial orders, over an infinite alphabet. As a model of an implementation, we introduce class register automata, a one-way automata model over words with multiple data values. Our model combines register automata and class memory automata. It has natural interpretations. In particular, it captures communicating automata with an unbounded number of processes, whose semantics can be described as a set of (dynamic) message sequence charts. On the specification side, we provide a local existential monadic second-order logic that does not impose any restriction on the number of variables. We study the realizability problem and show that every formula from that logic can be effectively, and in elementary time, translated into an equivalent class register automaton

A speculative execution approach to provide semantically aware contention management for concurrent systems

PhD ThesisMost modern platforms offer ample potention for parallel execution of concurrent programs yet concurrency control is required to exploit parallelism while maintaining program correctness. Pessimistic con- currency control featuring blocking synchronization and mutual ex- clusion, has given way to transactional memory, which allows the composition of concurrent code in a manner more intuitive for the application programmer. An important component in any transactional memory technique however is the policy for resolving conflicts on shared data, commonly referred to as the contention management policy. In this thesis, a Universal Construction is described which provides contention management for software transactional memory. The technique differs from existing approaches given that multiple execution paths are explored speculatively and in parallel. In the resolution of conflicts by state space exploration, we demonstrate that both concur- rent conflicts and semantic conflicts can be solved, promoting multi- threaded program progression. We de ne a model of computation called Many Systems, which defines the execution of concurrent threads as a state space management problem. An implementation is then presented based on concepts from the model, and we extend the implementation to incorporate nested transactions. Results are provided which compare the performance of our approach with an established contention management policy, under varying degrees of concurrent and semantic conflicts. Finally, we provide performance results from a number of search strategies, when nested transactions are introduced

ARPA Whitepaper

We propose a secure computation solution for blockchain networks. The correctness of computation is verifiable even under malicious majority condition using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC), and the privacy is preserved using Secret-Sharing. With state-of-the-art multiparty computation protocol and a layer2 solution, our privacy-preserving computation guarantees data security on blockchain, cryptographically, while reducing the heavy-lifting computation job to a few nodes. This breakthrough has several implications on the future of decentralized networks. First, secure computation can be used to support Private Smart Contracts, where consensus is reached without exposing the information in the public contract. Second, it enables data to be shared and used in trustless network, without disclosing the raw data during data-at-use, where data ownership and data usage is safely separated. Last but not least, computation and verification processes are separated, which can be perceived as computational sharding, this effectively makes the transaction processing speed linear to the number of participating nodes. Our objective is to deploy our secure computation network as an layer2 solution to any blockchain system. Smart Contracts\cite{smartcontract} will be used as bridge to link the blockchain and computation networks. Additionally, they will be used as verifier to ensure that outsourced computation is completed correctly. In order to achieve this, we first develop a general MPC network with advanced features, such as: 1) Secure Computation, 2) Off-chain Computation, 3) Verifiable Computation, and 4)Support dApps' needs like privacy-preserving data exchange

Competition at the Left Edge: Left-Dislocation vs. Topicalization in Heritage Germanic

The present work analyses left dislocation (LD) in Heritage German and Heritage Norwegian as a phenomenon of the left periphery of the clause. Fieldwork conducted from the 1940s through the 2010s shows both a robust maintenance of verb second (V2) and that pragmatically-conditioned copy left dislocation (CLD) occurs in complementary distribution with V2 in these heritage languages (HLs), and in ways that are consistent with the pre-immigration, homeland varieties. This study therefore unifies CLD and bare topic constructions (BTCs) under a single structure, in which the resumptive pronoun is either overt (CLD) or covert (BTC), with CLD being restricted to instances where there is either a pragmatic condition (e.g., emphasis, contrast, topic shift) or an interlocutor (e.g., narration). Infrequently, some speakers employ CLD in the absence of these conditions, where BTC would otherwise be expected. The authors propose that this change is motivated diachronically as the reanalysis of specifiers as heads, under the Avoid Silent Heads (ASH) principle (Eide 2011; cf. van Gelderen 2007), and consistent with the tendency for (heritage) speakers to prefer overt heads to covert ones (Polinsky 2018). Such change corresponds with the lexicalization of formerly pragmatically-conditioned XPs as obligatory heads.publishedVersio

Specifications and programs for computer software validation

Three software products developed during the study are reported and include: (1) FORTRAN Automatic Code Evaluation System, (2) the Specification Language System, and (3) the Array Index Validation System

Safe Programming Over Distributed Streams

The sheer scale of today\u27s data processing needs has led to a new paradigm of software systems centered around requirements for high-throughput, distributed, low-latency computation.Despite their widespread adoption, existing solutions have yet to provide a programming model with safe semantics -- and they disagree on basic design choices, in particular with their approach to parallelism. As a result, naive programmers are easily led to introduce correctness and performance bugs. This work proposes a reliable programming model for modern distributed stream processing, founded in a type system for partially ordered data streams. On top of the core type system, we propose language abstractions for working with streams -- mechanisms to build stream operators with (1) type-safe compositionality, (2) deterministic distribution, (3) run-time testing, and (4) static performance bounds. Our thesis is that viewing streams as partially ordered conveniently exposes parallelism without compromising safety or determinism. The ideas contained in this work are implemented in a series of open source software projects, including the Flumina, DiffStream, and Data Transducers libraries

On Split-State Quantum Tamper Detection and Non-Malleability

Tamper-detection codes (TDCs) and non-malleable codes (NMCs) are now fundamental objects at the intersection of cryptography and coding theory. Both of these primitives represent natural relaxations of error-correcting codes and offer related security guarantees in adversarial settings where error correction is impossible. While in a TDC, the decoder is tasked with either recovering the original message or rejecting it, in an NMC, the decoder is additionally allowed to output a completely unrelated message. In this work, we study quantum analogs of one of the most well-studied adversarial tampering models: the so-called split-state tampering model. In the $t$-split-state model, the codeword (or code-state) is divided into $t$ shares, and each share is tampered with "locally". Previous research has primarily focused on settings where the adversaries' local quantum operations are assisted by an unbounded amount of pre-shared entanglement, while the code remains unentangled, either classical or separable. We construct quantum TDCs and NMCs in several $\textit{resource-restricted}$ analogs of the split-state model, which are provably impossible using just classical codes. In particular, against split-state adversaries restricted to local (unentangled) operations, local operations and classical communication, as well as a "bounded storage model" where they are limited to a finite amount of pre-shared entanglement. We complement our code constructions in two directions. First, we present applications to designing secret sharing schemes, which inherit similar non-malleable and tamper-detection guarantees. Second, we discuss connections between our codes and quantum encryption schemes, which we leverage to prove singleton-type bounds on the capacity of certain families of quantum NMCs in the split-state model