THEMATIC PROGRAMS

March 28, 2024
THE FIELDS INSTITUTE
FOR RESEARCH IN MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES
July - August, 2011
Summer Thematic Program on the Mathematics of Constraint Satisfaction

Coxeter Lecture Series
July 11-13, 2011

Fields Institute, Room 230
4-5 pm

MOSHE VARDI, Rice University

July 11, 2011 And Logic Begat Computer Science: When Giants Roamed the Earth
July 12, 2011 From Philosophical to Industrial Logics
July 13, 2011 Logic, Automata, Games, and Algorithms

July 11, 2011
And Logic Begat Computer Science: When Giants Roamed the Earth

During the past fifty years there has been extensive, continuous, and growing interaction between logic and computer science. In fact, logic has been called "the calculus of computer science". The argument is that logic plays a fundamental role in computer science, similar to that played by calculus in the physical sciences and traditional engineering disciplines. Indeed, logic plays an important role in areas of computer science as disparate as architecture (logic gates), software engineering (specification and verification), programming languages (semantics, logic programming), databases (relational algebra and SQL), artificial intelligence (automated theorem proving), algorithms (complexity and expressiveness), and theory of computation (general notions of computability). This non-technical talk will provide an overview of the unusual effectiveness of logic in computer science by surveying the history of logic in computer science, going back all the way to Aristotle and Euclid, and showing how logic actually gave rise to computer science.

July 12, 2011
From Philosophical to Industrial Logics

One of the surprising developments in the area of program verification is how several ideas introduced by logicians in the first part of the 20th century ended up yielding at the start of the 21st century industry-standard property-specification languages called PSL and SVA. This development was enabled by the equally unlikely transformation of the mathematical machinery of automata on infinite words, introduced in the early 1960s for second-order arithmetics, into effective algorithms for industrial model-checking tools. This talk attempts to trace the tangled threads of this development.

July 13, 2011
Logic, Automata, Games, and Algorithms

The automata-theoretic approach to decision procedures, introduced by Buechi, Elgot, Rabin and Trakhtenbrot in the 1950s and 1960s, is one of the most fundamental approaches to decision procedures. Recently, this approach has found industrial applications in formal verification of hardware and software systems. The path from logic to practical algorithms goes not only through automata, but also through games, whose algorithmic aspects were studies by Chandra, Kozen, and Stockmeyer in the late 1970s. In this overview talk we describe the path from logic to algorithms via automata and games.


Moshe Vardi is a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, USA. He is the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Computer and Information Technology Institute. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite-model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is a renowned expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge (logic), and theoretical computer science.

Moshe Y. Vardi is the author of over 300 technical papers as well as the editor of several collections. He has authored the books Reasoning About Knowledge with Ronald Fagin, Joseph Y. Halpern, and Yoram Moses, and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications with Erich Grädel, Phokion G. Kolaitis, Leonid Libkin, Maarten Marx, Joel Spencer, Yde Venema, and Scott Weinstein. He is also the editor-in-chief of Communications of the ACM.

Vardi is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, a co-winner of the 2000 Gödel Prize, a co-winner of the 2005 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, and a co-winner of the LICS 2006 Test-of-Time Award. He holds honorary doctorates from Saarland University, Germany, and the University of Orleans, France. Dr Vardi is an editor of several international journals and the president of the International Federation of Computational Logicians. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He was designated Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information, and was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europea. He has also co-chaired the ACM Task Force on Job Migration.

For additional information contact thematic(PUT_AT_SIGN_HERE)fields.utoronto.ca

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