[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
306 Egan  Hall, Northeastern University  <<-- NOTE NONSTANDARD ROOM
    (building 60 on http://www.campusmap.neu.edu/)  
1030-1230

Harry Mairson
Computer Science Department
Brandeis University

"From Hilbert Spaces to Dilbert Spaces:  Context Semantics Made Simple"

I want to give a first-principles description of the {\em context
semantics} of Gonthier, Abadi, and L\'{e}vy, a computer-science
analogue of Girard's {\em geometry of interaction.}  I'll explain how
this denotational semantics models lambda-calculus, and more generally
multiplicative-exponential linear logic (MELL), by explaining the
call-by-name (CBN) coding of the lambda-calculus, and proving the
correctness of {\em readback}, where the normal form of a lambda-term
is recovered from its semantics.  This analysis yields the correctness
of Lamping's optimal reduction algorithm.

I also hope to discuss the relation of context semantics to linear
logic types and to ideas from {\em game semantics}, used to prove full
abstraction theorems for PCF and other lambda-calculus variants, and
to discuss their relation to Levy labels (used for {\em labelled
reduction} in lambda calculus) and their relation to flow analysis.
This talk doesn't have a lot of theorems, but it does have a lot of
nice looking pictures.

Upcoming presentations:

1/8/03: Ken Baclawski: Ontology-Based Computing

--Mitch