[Pl-seminar] Reminder: 2/24 Seminar: Ben Sherman, Overlapping pattern matching for programming with continuous functions

[Daniel Patterson]

Reminder - this is tomorrow!

On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 4:45 PM Daniel Patterson <dbp at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:

> Reminder: This is Friday!
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 12:53 PM Daniel Patterson <dbp at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> NUPRL Seminar presents
>
> Ben Sherman
> MIT
> Host: Gabriel Scherer
>
> 12:00pm
> Friday, February 24, 2017
> Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)
>
> Overlapping pattern matching for programming with continuous functions
>
> Abstract:
>
> Topology, when viewed from an unusual perspective (formal topology),
> describes how to compute with certain objects that are beyond the reach of
> induction, such as real numbers, probability distributions, streams, and
> function spaces. Accordingly, one gets a programming language whose types
> are spaces and whose functions are continuous maps.
>
> Does this language have pattern matching? In functional programming,
> pattern matching allows definition of a function by partitioning the input
> and defining the result in each case. We generalize to programming with
> spaces, where patterns need not represent decidable predicates and also may
> overlap, potentially allowing nondeterministic behavior in overlapping
> regions. These overlapping pattern matches are useful for writing a wide
> array of computer programs on spaces, such as programs that make
> approximate computations or decisions based on continuous values or that
> manipulate "partial" datatypes.
>
> This talk will introduce topology from a computational perspective, and
> explore some programs that can be built with this framework using
> overlapping pattern matching.
>
> Bio:
>
> Ben Sherman is a second-year PhD student at MIT, advised by Adam Chlipala
> and Michael Carbin.
>
>
>
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