[Review of] Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924, translated by Frederik L. Schadt

This historically important document is a translation of a humorous comic book published in 1931 based on the experiences of the author, Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, as he immigrated to the United States. Kiyama crossed the ocean from Japan to study art in San Francisco in 1904, at the age of nineteen. Upon his arrival he worked as a house servant during the day and went to school at night. It is not well known here, but until the Second World War a large number of Japanese immigrants came to mainland America with student visas rather than work permits; many of these students became school-boys (that is, household help) and did not really go to school (though Kiyama did actually attend art college)

Entropy Generation in Computation and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Landauer discussed the minimum energy necessary for computation and stated that erasure of information is accompanied by heat generation to the amount of kT ln2/bit. Modifying the above statement, we claim that erasure of information is accompanied by entropy generation k ln2/bit. Some new concepts will be introduced in the field of thermodynamics that are implicitly included in our statement. The new concepts that we will introduce are ``partitioned state'', which corresponds to frozen state such as in ice, ``partitioning process'' and ``unifying process''. Developing our statement, i.e., our thermodynamics of computation, we will point out that the so-called ``residual entropy'' does not exist in the partitioned state. We then argue that a partioning process is an entropy decreasing process. Finally we reconsider the second law of thermodynamics especially when computational processes are involved.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Multiparty Session Actors

Actor coordination armoured with a suitable protocol description language has been a pressing problem in the actors community. We study the applicability of multiparty session type (MPST) protocols for verification of actor programs. We incorporate sessions to actors by introducing minimum additions to the model such as the notion of actor roles and protocol mailbox. The framework uses Scribble, which is a protocol description language based on multiparty session types. Our programming model supports actor-like syntax and runtime verification mechanism guaranteeing type-safety and progress of the communicating entities. An actor can implement multiple roles in a similar way as an object can implement multiple interfaces. Multiple roles allow for inter-concurrency in a single actor still preserving its progress property. We demonstrate our framework by designing and implementing a session actor library in Python and its runtime verification mechanism.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2014, arXiv:1406.331

Towards Reversible Sessions

In this work, we incorporate reversibility into structured communication-based programming, to allow parties of a session to automatically undo, in a rollback fashion, the effect of previously executed interactions. This permits taking different computation paths along the same session, as well as reverting the whole session and starting a new one. Our aim is to define a theoretical basis for examining the interplay in concurrent systems between reversible computation and session-based interaction. We thus enrich a session-based variant of pi-calculus with memory devices, dedicated to keep track of the computation history of sessions in order to reverse it. We discuss our initial investigation concerning the definition of a session type discipline for the proposed reversible calculus, and its practical advantages for static verification of safe composition in communication-centric distributed software performing reversible computations.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2014, arXiv:1406.331