Fair Testing

In this paper we present a solution to the long-standing problem of characterising the coarsest liveness-preserving pre-congruence with respect to a full (TCSP-inspired) process algebra. In fact, we present two distinct characterisations, which give rise to the same relation: an operational one based on a De Nicola-Hennessy-like testing modality which we call should-testing, and a denotational one based on a refined notion of failures. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the should-testing pre-congruence is that it abstracts from divergences in the same way as Milner¿s observation congruence, and as a consequence is strictly coarser than observation congruence. In other words, should-testing has a built-in fairness assumption. This is in itself a property long sought-after; it is in notable contrast to the well-known must-testing of De Nicola and Hennessy (denotationally characterised by a combination of failures and divergences), which treats divergence as catrastrophic and hence is incompatible with observation congruence. Due to these characteristics, should-testing supports modular reasoning and allows to use the proof techniques of observation congruence, but also supports additional laws and techniques. Moreover, we show decidability of should-testing (on the basis of the denotational characterisation). Finally, we demonstrate its advantages by the application to a number of examples, including a scheduling problem, a version of the Alternating Bit-protocol, and fair lossy communication channel

Bayesian efficiency analysis with a flexible form: The aim cost function

Sampling;Bayesian Statistics

Clearing Restarting Automata

Restartovací automaty byly navrženy jako model pro redukční analýzu, která představuje lingvisticky motivovanou metodu pro kontrolu korektnosti věty. Cílem práce je studovat omezenější modely restartovacích automatů, které smí vymazat podřetězec nebo jej nahradit speciálním pomocným symbolem, jenom na základě omezeného lokálního kontextu tohoto podřetězce. Tyto restartovací automaty se nazývají clearing restarting automata. V práci jsou taktéž zkoumány uzávěrové vlastnosti těchto automatů, jejich vztah k Chomskeho hierarchii a možnosti učení těchto automatů na základě pozitivních a negativních příkladů.Restarting automata were introduced as a model for analysis by reduction which is a linguistically motivated method for checking correctness of a sentence. The goal of the thesis is to study more restricted models of restarting automata which based on a limited context can either delete a substring of the current content of its tape or replace a substring by a special symbol, which cannot be overwritten anymore, but it can be deleted later. Such restarting automata are called clearing restarting automata. The thesis investigates the properties of clearing restarting automata, their relation to Chomsky hierarchy and possibilities for machine learning of such automata from positive and negative samples.Department of Software and Computer Science EducationKatedra softwaru a výuky informatikyFaculty of Mathematics and PhysicsMatematicko-fyzikální fakult

Denotational Fixed-Point Semantics for Constructive Scheduling of Synchronous Concurrency

The synchronous model of concurrent computation (SMoCC) is well established for programming languages in the domain of safety-critical reactive and embedded systems. Translated into mainstream C/Java programming, the SMoCC corresponds to a cyclic execution model in which concurrent threads are synchronised on a logical clock that cuts system computation into a sequence of macro-steps. A causality analysis verifies the existence of a schedule on memory accesses to ensure each macro-step is deadlock-free and determinate. We introduce an abstract semantic domain I(D, P) and an associated denotational fixed point semantics for reasoning about concurrent and sequential variable accesses within a synchronous cycle-based model of computation. We use this domain for a new and extended behavioural definition of Berry’s causality analysis in terms of approximation intervals. The domain I(D, P) extends the domain I(D) from our previous work and fixes a mistake in the treatment of initialisations. Based on this fixed point semantics the notion of Input Berry-constructiveness (IBC) for synchronous programs is proposed. This new IBC class lies properly between strong (SBC) and normal Berry-constructiveness (BC) defined in previous work. SBC and BC are two ways to interpret the standard constructive semantics of synchronous programming, as exemplified by imperative SMoCC languages such as Esterel or Quartz. SBC is often too restrictive as it requires all variables to be initialised by the program. BC can be too permissive because it initialises all variables to a fixed value, by default. Where the initialisation happens through the memory, e.g., when carrying values from one synchronous tick to the next, then IBC is more appropriate. IBC links two levels of execution, the macro-step level and the micro-step level. We prove that the denotational fixed point analysis for IBC, and hence Berry’s causality analysis, is sound with respect to operational micro-level scheduling. The denotational model can thus be viewed as a compositional presentation of a synchronous scheduling strategy that ensures reactiveness and determinacy for imperative concurrent programming

Faster Compact On-Line Lempel-Ziv Factorization

We present a new on-line algorithm for computing the Lempel-Ziv factorization of a string that runs in $O(N\log N)$ time and uses only $O(N\log\sigma)$ bits of working space, where $N$ is the length of the string and $\sigma$ is the size of the alphabet. This is a notable improvement compared to the performance of previous on-line algorithms using the same order of working space but running in either $O(N\log^3N)$ time (Okanohara & Sadakane 2009) or $O(N\log^2N)$ time (Starikovskaya 2012). The key to our new algorithm is in the utilization of an elegant but less popular index structure called Directed Acyclic Word Graphs, or DAWGs (Blumer et al. 1985). We also present an opportunistic variant of our algorithm, which, given the run length encoding of size $m$ of a string of length $N$, computes the Lempel-Ziv factorization on-line, in $O\left(m \cdot \min \left\{\frac{(\log\log m)(\log \log N)}{\log\log\log N}, \sqrt{\frac{\log m}{\log \log m}} \right\}\right)$ time and $O(m\log N)$ bits of space, which is faster and more space efficient when the string is run-length compressible

LIPIcs

Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms play an important role in many critical/high-availability applications. These algorithms are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, due to asynchronous communication and the occurrence of faults, such as the network dropping messages or computers crashing. Nonetheless there is surprisingly little language and verification support to build distributed systems based on fault-tolerant algorithms. In this paper, we present some of the challenges that a designer has to overcome to implement a fault-tolerant distributed system. Then we review different models that have been proposed to reason about distributed algorithms and sketch how such a model can form the basis for a domain-specific programming language. Adopting a high-level programming model can simplify the programmer's life and make the code amenable to automated verification, while still compiling to efficiently executable code. We conclude by summarizing the current status of an ongoing language design and implementation project that is based on this idea

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