Proving the Equivalence of Microstep and Macrostep Semantics

Abstract. Recently, an embedding of the synchronous programming language Quartz (an Esterel variant) in the theorem prover HOL has been presented. This embedding is based on control flow predicates that refer to macrosteps of the pro-grams. The original semantics of synchronous languages like Esterel is however normally given at the more detailed microstep level. This paper describes how a variant of the Esterel microstep semantics has been defined in HOL and how its equivalence to the control flow predicate semantics has been proved. Beneath proving the equivalence of the micro- and macrostep semantics, the work pre-sented here is also an important extension of the existing embedding: While rea-soning at the microstep level is not necessary for code generation, it is sometimes advantageous for understanding programs, as some effects like schizophrenia or causality problems become only visible at the microstep level.

On the Multi-Language Construction

Modern software is no more developed in a single programming language. Instead, programmers tend to exploit cross-language interoperability mechanisms to combine code stemming from different languages, and thus yielding fully-fledged multi-language programs. Whilst this approach enables developers to benefit from the strengths of each single-language, on the other hand it complicates the semantics of such programs. Indeed, the resulting multi-language does not meet any of the semantics of the combined languages. In this paper, we broaden the boundary functions-based approach a la Matthews and Findler to propose an algebraic framework that provides a constructive mathematical notion of multi-language able to determine its semantics. The aim of this work is to overcome the lack of a formal method (resp., model) to design (resp., represent) a multi-language, regardless of the inherent nature of the underlying languages. We show that our construction ensures the uniqueness of the semantic function (i.e., the multi-language semantics induced by the combined languages) by proving the initiality of the term model (i.e., the abstract syntax of the multi-language) in its category

Evaluation of a "smart" pedestrian counting system based on echo state networks

We have designed an inexpensive intelligent pedestrian counting system. The pedestrian counting system consists of several counters that can be connected together in a distributed fashion and communicate over the wireless channel. The motion pattern is recorded using a set of passive infrared (PIR) sensors. Each counter has one wireless sensor node that processes the PIR sensor data and transmits it to a base station. Then echo state network, a special kind of recurrent neural network, is used to predict the pedestrian count from the input pattern. The evaluation of the performance of such networks in a novel kind of application is one focus of this work. The counter gave a performance of 80.4% which is better than the commercially available low-priced pedestrian counters. The article reports the experiments we did for analyzing the counterperformance and lists the strengths and limitations of the current implementation. It will also report the preliminary test results obtained by substituting the PIR sensors with low-cost active IR distance sensors which can improve the counter performance further