The Immune System: the ultimate fractionated cyber-physical system

In this little vision paper we analyze the human immune system from a computer science point of view with the aim of understanding the architecture and features that allow robust, effective behavior to emerge from local sensing and actions. We then recall the notion of fractionated cyber-physical systems, and compare and contrast this to the immune system. We conclude with some challenges.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455

Reasoning about Programs With Effects

AbstractThis note presents a summary of my research on reasoning about programs with effects. This work has been carried out in collaboration with several colleagues over roughly the past ten years. The work has had two major sub-themes: reasoning about functional programs extended with imperative features; and reasoning about components of open distributed systems. Functional programming languages extended with imperative features include languages like Scheme and ML as well as object-based languages such as Java. This work has focused on operationally based semantics and formalisms for specifying and reasoning about such programs. The work on components of open distributed systems has been based on the actor model of computation and has focused on developing semantic models for modular specification and composition of actor systems

A Compositional Framework for Preference-Aware Agents

A formal description of a Cyber-Physical system should include a rigorous specification of the computational and physical components involved, as well as their interaction. Such a description, thus, lends itself to a compositional model where every module in the model specifies the behavior of a (computational or physical) component or the interaction between different components. We propose a framework based on Soft Constraint Automata that facilitates the component-wise description of such systems and includes the tools necessary to compose subsystems in a meaningful way, to yield a description of the entire system. Most importantly, Soft Constraint Automata allow the description and composition of components' preferences as well as environmental constraints in a uniform fashion. We illustrate the utility of our framework using a detailed description of a patrolling robot, while highlighting methods of composition as well as possible techniques to employ them.Comment: In Proceedings V2CPS-16, arXiv:1612.0402

A Formal Framework for Interactive Agents

AbstractThis paper proposes a formal framework and architecture for specification and analysis of interactive agents. The framework can be used to explore the design space, study features of different points in the design space, and to develop executable specifications of specific agents and study their interactions with the environment. A long term goal is development of reasoning principles specialized to different regions of the design space

Can Actors and π-Agents Live Together?

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