Overview of the contents of "Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures: Selected papers from FOSSACS 2005

Sassone, V.

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Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

Author's personal copyTheoretical Computer Science 390 (2008) 127–128www.elsevier.com/locate/tcsFoundations of Software Science and Computational Structures:Selected papers from FOSSACS 2005PrefaceThis issue of Theoretical Computer Science contains six of the best contributions to the 8th edition of “Foundationsof Software Science and Computation Structures”, FOSSACS 2005, held in Edinburgh, Scotland on 2–4 April 2005.FOSSACS is a member conference of ETAPS, the “European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice ofSoftware”. Dedicated to foundational research for software science, in its ten years of existence FOSSACS hasexperienced a continued and tremendous growth both in quantity of submissions and quality of programmes, andis now a ﬁrmly-established point of reference for the Theoretical Computer Science research community. FOSSACSinvites submissions on theories and methods to underpin the analysis, integration, synthesis, transformation, andveriﬁcation of programs and software systems. Typical topics include: algebraic models; automata and languagetheory; behavioural equivalences; categorical models; computation processes over discrete and continuous data;computation structures; logics of programs; modal, spatial, and temporal logics; models of concurrent, reactive,distributed, and mobile systems; models of security and trust; language-based security; process algebras and calculi;semantics of programming languages; software speciﬁcation and reﬁnement; type systems and type theory.FOSSACS 2005 consisted of one invited and 30 contributed papers selected out of 108 very high-qualitysubmissions. The proceedings have appeared in Springer LNCS, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3441.This volume bears a debt of gratitude to the FOSSACS 2005’s referees and Programme Committee, for their scholarlywork drove me in the selection of the papers for the special issue. I wish of course to thank very warmly the refereesof the full articles as they appear in this volume, who have contributed a very substantial and valuable effort. Theyare: Marco Bernardo, Thomas Brihaye, Vincent Danos, Daniel Hirschkoff, Petr Jancar, Bartek Klin, Jim Laird, RupakMajumdar, Guy McCusker, Eugenio Moggi, Dirk Pattinson, Eijiro Sumi, and Daniele Varacca.I hope you will enjoy the volume.Southampton, August 2007An invitation to readThis collection of selected papers provides an excellent sample of the gamut of research topics FOSSACS has tooffer. I will give below a brief synopsis of each of them, as an invitation to the casual reader to read on.TRUE-CONCURRENCY PROBABILISTIC MODELS:M ARKOV NETS AND A LAW OF LARGE NUMBERSSamy Abbes and Albert BenvenisteThispaperintroducesanewstochasticmodelbasedonPetrinets,theMarkovnets.Thekeytoassigningmeaningfulprobabilities to execution sequences is a sophisticated notion of branching cell which identiﬁes ‘minimal’ choicepoints in the net, building on a similar concept for probabilistic event structures. The result in the paper is a Law ofLarge Numbers which enables a quantitative analysis of the asymptotic behaviour of Markov nets.0304-3975/$ - see front matter c   2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2007.09.019Author's personal copy128 Editorial / Theoretical Computer Science 390 (2008) 127–128FULL ABSTRACTION FOR POLYMORPHIC PI-CALCULUSAlan Jeffrey and Julian RathkeThe authors establish a fully-abstract model for an asynchronous polymorphic  -calculus, the ﬁrst such modelever for a concurrent, polymorphic calculus. The key differences with respect to previous attempts are the ability toassign multiple types to names and the inclusion of an essentially ‘untyped’ name matching construct, which raisesthe expressiveness of the calculus and so makes its semantics ‘ﬁner.’OPTIMAL REACHABILITY FOR MULTI-PRICED TIMED AUTOMATAKim Guldstrand Larsen and Jacob Illum RasmussenThe paper is concerned with priced timed automata, which are hybrid automata with time and cost parameters thatmeasure the price of waiting in a state while traversing the automaton. The typical problem on priced timed automatais the reachability of a given state at a minimal cost. The authors here study time automata with multiple cost variablesfor the ﬁrst time, and prove the decidability of generalised reachability questions — such as optimal reachabilityand optimal conditional reachability — that is, reachability at a minimal primary cost while keeping secondary costvariables within given bounds.THIRD-ORDER IDEALIZED ALGOL WITH ITERATION IS DECIDABLE, Andrzej S. Murawski and Igor WalukiewiczThis paper merges techniques from automata theory and results from game semantics to formulate algorithms forcontextual equivalence and approximation of programs in the third-order fragment of Idealized Algol with iteration.Indeed, by representing game semantics strategies as pushdown automata with PTIME equivalence and inclusionproblems, the authors prove that contextual equivalence and approximation for the chosen language are EXPTIME-hard.EXPRESSIVITY OF COALGEBRAIC MODAL LOGIC:T HE LIMITS AND BEYONDLutz Schr¨ oderModal logic is increasingly presented as the natural logic for coalgebras, as while the latter are a unifying semanticframework for reactive systems and bisimulation, the former are often invariant under behavioural equivalence. Thatis,behaviourallyindistinguishablestatesarealsologicallyequivalent.Thispaperpresentsaneasycriterionforamodallogic to be expressive, i.e. such that logically indistinguishable states are also behavioural equivalent. In addition, theauthor shows that every accessible functor admits an expressive polyadic modal logic, that is, a logic with multi-argument modalities.FREE-ALGEBRA MODELS FOR THE  -CALCULUSIan StarkThe author provides an novel characterisation of the well-known functor-category fully-abstract model of the ﬁnite -calculus. This in fact yields an algebraic description of  -models based on intuitive operations and equations overcategories of name-indexed sets, the fully abstract model being the initial algebra. Besides the speciﬁc results, thealgebraic theories introduced in the paper are of independent value and possibly of further consequence.FOSSACS 2005 Program Committee.Luca Aceto, Michele Bugliesi, Lu´ ıs Caires, Giuseppe Castagna, Witold Charatonik, Vincent Danos, Robert Harper,Petr Janˇ car, Naoki Kobayashi, Orna Kupferman, Guy McCusker, Ugo Montanari, Anca Muscholl, Tobias Nipkow,Andrew Pitts, Amir Pnueli, David Sands, Vladimiro Sassone, Andre Scedrov, Peter Selinger, Wolfgang Thomas,Glynn Winskel, Nobuko Yoshida.Programme Chair,FOSSACS 2005Vladimiro SassoneECS, University of Southampton,United Kingdom

Preface

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Sassone, Vladimiro

Elsevier - Publisher Connector 

Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures: Selected papers from FOSSACS 2005 

Theoretical Computer Science 390 (2008) 127–128
www.elsevier.com/locate/tcs
Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures:
Selected papers from FOSSACS 2005
Preface
This issue of Theoretical Computer Science contains six of the best contributions to the 8th edition of “Foundations
of Software Science and Computation Structures”, FOSSACS 2005, held in Edinburgh, Scotland on 2–4 April 2005.
FOSSACS is a member conference of ETAPS, the “European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of
Software”. Dedicated to foundational research for software science, in its ten years of existence FOSSACS has
experienced a continued and tremendous growth both in quantity of submissions and quality of programmes, and
is now a firmly-established point of reference for the Theoretical Computer Science research community. FOSSACS
invites submissions on theories and methods to underpin the analysis, integration, synthesis, transformation, and
verification of programs and software systems. Typical topics include: algebraic models; automata and language
theory; behavioural equivalences; categorical models; computation processes over discrete and continuous data;
computation structures; logics of programs; modal, spatial, and temporal logics; models of concurrent, reactive,
distributed, and mobile systems; models of security and trust; language-based security; process algebras and calculi;
semantics of programming languages; software specification and refinement; type systems and type theory.
FOSSACS 2005 consisted of one invited and 30 contributed papers selected out of 108 very high-quality
submissions. The proceedings have appeared in Springer LNCS, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3441.
This volume bears a debt of gratitude to the FOSSACS 2005’s referees and Programme Committee, for their scholarly
work drove me in the selection of the papers for the special issue. I wish of course to thank very warmly the referees
of the full articles as they appear in this volume, who have contributed a very substantial and valuable effort. They
are: Marco Bernardo, Thomas Brihaye, Vincent Danos, Daniel Hirschkoff, Petr Jancar, Bartek Klin, Jim Laird, Rupak
Majumdar, Guy McCusker, Eugenio Moggi, Dirk Pattinson, Eijiro Sumi, and Daniele Varacca.
I hope you will enjoy the volume.
Southampton, August 2007
An invitation to read
This collection of selected papers provides an excellent sample of the gamut of research topics FOSSACS has to
offer. I will give below a brief synopsis of each of them, as an invitation to the casual reader to read on.
TRUE-CONCURRENCY PROBABILISTIC MODELS: MARKOV NETS AND A LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS
Samy Abbes and Albert Benveniste
This paper introduces a new stochastic model based on Petri nets, the Markov nets. The key to assigning meaningful
probabilities to execution sequences is a sophisticated notion of branching cell which identifies ‘minimal’ choice
points in the net, building on a similar concept for probabilistic event structures. The result in the paper is a Law of
Large Numbers which enables a quantitative analysis of the asymptotic behaviour of Markov nets.
0304-3975/$ - see front matter c© 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2007.09.019
128 Editorial / Theoretical Computer Science 390 (2008) 127–128
FULL ABSTRACTION FOR POLYMORPHIC PI-CALCULUS
Alan Jeffrey and Julian Rathke
The authors establish a fully-abstract model for an asynchronous polymorphic pi -calculus, the first such model
ever for a concurrent, polymorphic calculus. The key differences with respect to previous attempts are the ability to
assign multiple types to names and the inclusion of an essentially ‘untyped’ name matching construct, which raises
the expressiveness of the calculus and so makes its semantics ‘finer.’
OPTIMAL REACHABILITY FOR MULTI-PRICED TIMED AUTOMATA
Kim Guldstrand Larsen and Jacob Illum Rasmussen
The paper is concerned with priced timed automata, which are hybrid automata with time and cost parameters that
measure the price of waiting in a state while traversing the automaton. The typical problem on priced timed automata
is the reachability of a given state at a minimal cost. The authors here study time automata with multiple cost variables
for the first time, and prove the decidability of generalised reachability questions — such as optimal reachability
and optimal conditional reachability — that is, reachability at a minimal primary cost while keeping secondary cost
variables within given bounds.
THIRD-ORDER IDEALIZED ALGOL WITH ITERATION IS DECIDABLE, Andrzej S. Murawski and Igor Walukiewicz
This paper merges techniques from automata theory and results from game semantics to formulate algorithms for
contextual equivalence and approximation of programs in the third-order fragment of Idealized Algol with iteration.
Indeed, by representing game semantics strategies as pushdown automata with PTIME equivalence and inclusion
problems, the authors prove that contextual equivalence and approximation for the chosen language are EXPTIME-
hard.
EXPRESSIVITY OF COALGEBRAIC MODAL LOGIC: THE LIMITS AND BEYOND
Lutz Schro¨der
Modal logic is increasingly presented as the natural logic for coalgebras, as while the latter are a unifying semantic
framework for reactive systems and bisimulation, the former are often invariant under behavioural equivalence. That
is, behaviourally indistinguishable states are also logically equivalent. This paper presents an easy criterion for a modal
logic to be expressive, i.e. such that logically indistinguishable states are also behavioural equivalent. In addition, the
author shows that every accessible functor admits an expressive polyadic modal logic, that is, a logic with multi-
argument modalities.
FREE-ALGEBRA MODELS FOR THE pi -CALCULUS
Ian Stark
The author provides an novel characterisation of the well-known functor-category fully-abstract model of the finite
pi -calculus. This in fact yields an algebraic description of pi -models based on intuitive operations and equations over
categories of name-indexed sets, the fully abstract model being the initial algebra. Besides the specific results, the
algebraic theories introduced in the paper are of independent value and possibly of further consequence.
FOSSACS 2005 Program Committee.
Luca Aceto, Michele Bugliesi, Luı´s Caires, Giuseppe Castagna, Witold Charatonik, Vincent Danos, Robert Harper,
Petr Jancˇar, Naoki Kobayashi, Orna Kupferman, Guy McCusker, Ugo Montanari, Anca Muscholl, Tobias Nipkow,
Andrew Pitts, Amir Pnueli, David Sands, Vladimiro Sassone, Andre Scedrov, Peter Selinger, Wolfgang Thomas,
Glynn Winskel, Nobuko Yoshida.
Programme Chair,
FOSSACS 2005
Vladimiro Sassone
ECS, University of Southampton,
United Kingdom


Sassone, V

Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures: Selected papers from FOSSACS 2005

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