[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, 11/29/06
11:45am-1:30pm
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Riccardo Pucella

The Semantics of Evidential Reasoning

Many scenarios in CS can be modeled as agents making decisions based
on observations that help them decide between competing
hypotheses. Observations can be seen as outcomes of simple
experiments. Intuitively, observations may provide more evidence for
some of the hypotheses than some others. This evidence can be
quantified, and has a several pleasant properties.

In this talk, I want to focus on the general problem of deriving the
evidence provided by observations when the experiment controlling the
observations is more complex. Roughly, we can view an experiment as a
program in a particular programming language, and devise an
evidence-based semantics for experiments written in that programming
language that associates with every observations in an experiment the
evidence provided by those observations. I will explore the
relationship between the resulting semantics and the classical
semantics for probabilistic programs.

Upcoming Events:

# Wed 12/6 Dick Gabriel
# Wed 12/13 Pete Manolios, A Complete Compositional Reasoning
  Framework with Applications to Hardware Verification
# Wed 1/24 Bil Lewis, Omniscient Debugging


--Mitch