Mathematical logic and computer science have driven the design of a growing number of logics and related formalisms such as set theories and type theories. In response to this population explosion, logical frameworks have been developed as formal meta-languages in which to represent, structure, relate and reason about logics.

Research on logical frameworks has diverged into separate communities, often with conflicting backgrounds and philosophies. In particular, two of the most important logical frameworks are the framework of institutions, from the area of model theory based on category theory, and the Edinburgh Logical Framework LF, from the area of proof theory based on dependent type theory. Even though their ultimate motivations overlap – for example in applications to software verification – they have fundamentally different perspectives on logic.

In the current paper, we design a logical framework that integrates the frameworks of institutions and LF in a way that combines their complementary advantages while retaining the elegance of each of them. In particular, our framework takes a balanced approach between model theory and proof theory, and permits the representation of logics in a way that comprises all major ingredients of a logic: syntax, models, satisfaction, judgments and proofs. This provides a theoretical basis for the systematic study of logics in a comprehensive logical framework. Our framework has been applied to obtain a large library of structured and machine-verified encodings of logics and logic translations.

We investigate universal algebra over the category Nom of nominal sets. Using the fact that Nom is a full reflective subcategory of a monadic category, we obtain an HSP-like theorem for algebras over nominal sets. We isolate a ‘uniform’ fragment of our equational logic, which corresponds to the nominal logics present in the literature. We give semantically invariant translations of theories for nominal algebra and NEL into ‘uniform’ theories, and systematically prove HSP theorems for models of these theories.

Computable analysis and effective descriptive set theory are both concerned with complete metric spaces, functions between them and subsets thereof in an effective setting. The precise relationship of the various definitions used in the two disciplines has so far been neglected, a situation this paper is meant to remedy.

As the role of the Cauchy completion is relevant for both effective approaches to Polish spaces, we consider the interplay of effectivity and completion in some more detail.

A desired closure property in Bayesian probability is that an updated posterior distribution be in the same class of distributions – say Gaussians – as the prior distribution. When the updating takes place via a statistical model, one calls the class of prior distributions the ‘conjugate priors’ of the model. This paper gives (1) an abstract formulation of this notion of conjugate prior, using channels, in a graphical language, (2) a simple abstract proof that such conjugate priors yield Bayesian inversions and (3) an extension to multiple updates. The theory is illustrated with several standard examples.

Argumentation is a proof theoretic paradigm for reasoning under uncertainty. Whereas a ‘proof’ establishes its conclusion outright, an ‘argument’ can only lend a measure of support. Thus, the process of argumentation consists of identifying all the arguments for a particular hypothesis φ, and then calculating the support for φ from the weight attached to these individual arguments. Argumentation has been incorporated as the inference mechanism of a large scale medical expert system, the ‘Oxford System of Medicine’ (OSM), and it is therefore important to demonstrate that the approach is theoretically justified. This paper provides a formal semantics for the notion of argument embodied in the OSM. We present a categorical account in which arguments are the arrows of a semilattice enriched category. The axioms of a cartesian closed category are modified to give the notion of an ‘evidential closed category’, and we show that this provides the correct enriched setting in which to model the connectives of conjunction (&) and implication (⇒).

Finally, we develop a theory of ‘confidence measures’ over such categories, and relate this to the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence.

System NEL is the mixed commutative/non-commutative linear logic BV augmented with linear logic's exponentials, or, equivalently, it is MELL augmented with the non-commutative self-dual connective seq. NEL is presented in deep inference, because no Gentzen formalism can express it in such a way that the cut rule is admissible. Other recent work shows that system NEL is Turing-complete, and is able to express process algebra sequential composition directly and model causal quantum evolution faithfully. In this paper, we show cut elimination for NEL, based on a technique that we call splitting. The splitting theorem shows how and to what extent we can recover a sequent-like structure in NEL proofs. When combined with a ‘decomposition’ theorem, proved in the previous paper of this series, splitting yields a cut-elimination procedure for NEL.

While developing a method for reasoning about programs, Pitts defined the [top ][top ]-closed relations as an alternative to the standard admissible relations. This paper reformulates and studies Pitts's operational concept of [top ][top ]-closure in a semantic framework. It investigates the non-trivial connection between [top ][top ]-closure and admissibility, showing that [top ][top ]-closure is strictly stronger than admissibility and that every [top ][top ]-closed relation corresponds to an admissible preorder.

We use hidden Markov models to motivate a quantitative compositional semantics for noninterference-based security with iteration, including a refinement- or ‘implements’ relation that compares two programs with respect to their information leakage; and we propose a program algebra for source-level reasoning about such programs, in particular as a means of establishing that an ‘implementation’ program leaks no more than its ‘specification’ program.

This joins two themes: we extend our earlier work, having iteration but only qualitative (Morgan 2009), by making it quantitative; and we extend our earlier quantitative work (McIver et al. 2010) by including iteration.

We advocate stepwise refinement and source-level program algebra – both as conceptual reasoning tools and as targets for automated assistance. A selection of algebraic laws is given to support this view in the case of quantitative noninterference; and it is demonstrated on a simple iterated password-guessing attack.

We define the class of divisibility monoids that arise as quotients of the free monoid Σ* modulo certain equations of the form ab = cd. These form a much larger class than free partially commutative monoids, and we show, under certain assumptions, that the recognizable languages in these divisibility monoids coincide with c-rational languages. The proofs rely on Ramsey's theorem, distributive lattice theory and on Hashigushi's rank function generalized to these monoids. We obtain Ochmański's theorem on recognizable languages in free partially commutative monoids as a consequence.

Retrenchment is a flexible model evolution formalism that compensates for the limitations imposed by specific formulations of refinement. Its refinement-like proof obligations feature additional predicates for accommodating design data describing the model change. The best results are obtained when refinement and retrenchment cooperate, the paradigmatic scheme for this being the commuting square or tower, in which ‘horizontal retrenchment rungs’ commute with ‘vertical refinement columns’ to navigate through a much more extensive design space than permitted by refinement alone. In practice, the navigation is accomplished through ‘square completion’ constructions, and we present and prove a full suite of square completion theorems.

In ACP-style process algebra the interpretation of a constant atomic action combines action execution with termination. In a setting with timing, different forms of termination can be distinguished: some-time termination, termination before the next clock tick, urgent termination, having terminated. In a setting with the silent action $\tau$, we also have silent termination. This leads to problems with the interpretation of atomic actions in timed theories that involve some form of the empty process or some form of the silent action. Reflection on these problems led to a redesign of basic process algebra, where action execution and termination are separated. Instead of actions as constants, we have action prefix operators. Sequential composition remains a basic operator, and thus we have two basic constants for termination: $\delta$ for unsuccessful termination (deadlock) and $\epsilon$ for successful termination (skip). We can recover standard ACP-style process algebras as subtheories of the new theory. The new approach has definite advantages over the standard approach. The paper contributes to ongoing work on relationships between algebras with different timing features.

We present a type-based flow analysis for simply typed lambda calculus with booleans, data-structures and recursion. The analysis is exact in the following sense: if the analysis predicts a redex, there exists a reduction sequence (using standard reduction plus context propagation rules) such that this redex will be reduced. The precision is accomplished using intersection typing.

It follows that the analysis is non-elementary recursive – more surprisingly, the analysis is decidable. We argue that the specification of such an analysis provides a good starting point for developing new flow analyses and an important benchmark against which other flow analyses can be compared. Furthermore, we believe that the techniques employed for stating and proving exactness are of independent interest: they provide methods for reasoning about the precision of program analyses.

A preliminary version of this paper has previously been published (Mossin 1997b). The present paper extends, elaborates and corrects this previously published abstract.

We define session types as projections of the behaviour of processes with respect to the operations processes perform on channels. This calls for a parallel composition operator over session types denoting the simultaneous access to a channel by two or more processes. The proposed approach allows us to define a semantically grounded theory of session types that does not require the linear usage of channels. However, type preservation and progress can only be guaranteed for processes that never receive channels they already own. A number of examples show that the resulting framework validates existing session-type theories and unifies them to some extent.

In this survey we discuss the generalisation of stochastic Kripke models for general modal logics through predicate liftings for functors over general measurable spaces. We derive results on expressivity and show that selection arguments allow us to incorporate the discussion of bisimilarity, provided the underlying spaces are assumed to be standard Borel.

Three integrity measures are introduced: contamination, channel suppression and program suppression. Contamination is a measure of how much untrusted information reaches trusted outputs; it is the dual of leakage, which is a measure of information-flow confidentiality. Channel suppression is a measure of how much information about inputs to a noisy channel is missing from the channel outputs. And program suppression is a measure of how much information about the correct output of a program is lost because of attacker influence and implementation errors. Program and channel suppression do not have interesting confidentiality duals. As a case study, a quantitative relationship between integrity, confidentiality and database privacy is examined.

We investigate the relationships between the dynamical properties of Boolean networks and properties of their Jacobian matrices, in particular the existence of local cycles in the associated interaction graphs. We define the notion of hereditarily bijective maps, and we use it to strengthen the property of unicity of a fixed point and to provide simplified proofs and generalizations of theorems relating attractors to the existence of local cycles, in particular local positive cycles. We then argue that this notion may not suffice to prove, under a suitable hypothesis such as the existence of a cyclic attractor or a stronger hypothesis, the existence of local negative cycles. We then consider a class of Boolean networks called and-or-nets, and for this class, we prove that the hypothesis of an antipodal attractive cycle implies the existence of a local negative cycle.

Bloom and Ésik's concept of iteration theory summarises all equational properties that iteration has in common applications, for example, in domain theory, where to every system of recursive equations, the least solution is assigned. This paper shows that in the coalgebraic approach to iteration, the more appropriate concept is that of a functorial iteration theory (called Elgot theory). These theories have a particularly simple axiomatisation, and all well-known examples of iteration theories are functorial. Elgot theories are proved to be monadic over the category of sets in context (or, more generally, the category of finitary endofunctors of a locally finitely presentable category). This demonstrates that functoriality is an equational property from the perspective of sets in context. In contrast, Bloom and Ésik worked in the base category of signatures rather than sets in context, and there iteration theories are monadic but Elgot theories are not. This explains why functoriality was not included in the definition of iteration theories.

(1) There is a finitely presented group with a word problem which is a uniformly effectively inseparable equivalence relation. (2) There is a finitely generated group of computable permutations with a word problem which is a universal co-computably enumerable equivalence relation. (3) Each c.e. truth-table degree contains the word problem of a finitely generated group of computable permutations.

A formulation of lattice theory as a system of rules added to sequent calculus is given. The analysis of proofs for the contraction-free calculus of classical predicate logic known as G3c extends to derivations with the mathematical rules of lattice theory. It is shown that minimal derivations of quantifier-free sequents enjoy a subterm property: all terms in such derivations are terms in the endsequent.

An alternative formulation of lattice theory as a system of rules in natural deduction style is given, both with explicit meet and join constructions and as a relational theory with existence axioms. A subterm property for the latter extends the standard decidable classes of quantificational formulas of pure predicate calculus to lattice theory.

The pioneering work of Hewitt and Baker on the foundations of concurrency during the seventies has inspired the development of the actor model as a promising object-based framework for understanding open distributed systems. So far, theoretical research on actors has focused on identifying the basic primitives of the model and on characterising the operational behaviour of distributed programming languages in terms of actor components. In this paper, we show that the actor model can also be used as a faithful basis for rigorously designing open distributed systems. We argue that a proof-theoretic approach is better suited to this purpose. An abstract-data-type-like axiomatisation of the actor primitives is proposed to support composing and reasoning from specifications of actor communities within a temporal logical system.