Lab Lunch Talks Schedule 2009–2010

This year, ICFP was held in Edinburgh, and my favorite talk was academy-award winner Dan Piponi (also known as 'sigfpe') on how to convert diagrams to commutative monads, with applications to Bayesian Probability and Quantum Computation. Both are very simple, and based on the notion of vector space. For my talk, I will cheat and present a video of Piponi's talk. I will also bring along a running version of the Haskell code he refers to and give a demo.

Structural operational semantics has proven enormously versatile in accommodating the full spectrum of programming language features, but this versatility is not achieved in a uniform manner: different features require their own idiosyncratic operational formats. I'll talk about ongoing joint work with Patricia Johann (University of Strathclyde) and Janis Voigtlaender (University of Bonn) which has the aim of systematizing the relationship between programming features and their operational semantics. Of course, we can only deal with a restricted class of examples. Nonetheless, this class includes some classic cases of interest.

I'll reflect on the often-asked question "If process algebras were cars, how long would it take to drive to the moon?'

Database archiving is important for the retrieval of old versions of a database and for temporal queries over the history of data. Over the past two years, we developed a management system for maintaining, populating, and querying archives of hierarchical data. Our archiver is based on a nested merge approach that efficiently stores multiple versions of hierarchical data in a compact archive. By merging elements into one data structure, any specific version is retrievable from the archive in a single pass over the data and efficient tracking of object history is possible. In the first part of this presentation, I will give an overview on the latest features of our archiver. In the second part, I will discuss our ongoing efforts regarding (i) archiving evolving databases, (ii) supporting distributed archives, and (iii) using the archiver as the basis of a system to create, maintain, and publish curated databases.

I will give a brief overview of some current work on testing overlap between (XML) path expressions by reducing to various logics for which efficient satisfiability checkers exist.

I'll describe a remarkable theorem of Barvinok which allows one to calculate the number of integer points in a multidimensional polyhedron. I'll also demonstrate an application of this to the analysis of memory bounds for Java programs with complex loop structures.

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