Full abstraction, i.e. that a function preserves equivalence from a source to a target, has been used extensively as a correctness criterion for mappings between models of computation. I here show that with fixed equivalences, fully abstract functions almost always exist. Also, with the function and one of the equivalences fixed the other equivalence can almost always be found.

We present a type system to guarantee termination of π-calculus processes that exploits input/output capabilities and subtyping, as originally introduced by Pierce and Sangiorgi, in order to analyse the usage of channels.

Our type system is based on Deng and Sangiorgi's level-based analysis of processes. We show that the addition of i/o-types makes it possible to typecheck processes where a form of level polymorphism is at work. We discuss to what extent this programming idiom can be treated by previously existing proposals. We demonstrate how our system can be extended to handle the encoding of the simply-typed λ-calculus, and discuss questions related to type inference.

The languages accepted by finite automata are precisely the languages denoted by regular expressions. In contrast, finite automata may exhibit behaviours that cannot be described by regular expressions up to bisimilarity. In this paper, we consider extensions of the theory of regular expressions with various forms of parallel composition and study the effect on expressiveness. First we prove that adding pure interleaving to the theory of regular expressions strictly increases its expressiveness modulo bisimilarity. Then, we prove that replacing the operation for pure interleaving by ACP-style parallel composition gives a further increase in expressiveness, still insufficient, however, to facilitate the expression of all finite automata up to bisimilarity. Finally, we prove that the theory of regular expressions with ACP-style parallel composition and encapsulation is expressive enough to express all finite automata up to bisimilarity. Our results extend the expressiveness results obtained by Bergstra, Bethke and Ponse for process algebras with (the binary variant of) Kleene's star operation.

In the concurrency theory, various semantic equivalences on transition systems are based on traces decorated with some additional observations, generally referred to as decorated traces. Using the generalized powerset construction, recently introduced by a subset of the authors (Silva et al.2010 FSTTCS. LIPIcs8 272–283), we give a coalgebraic presentation of decorated trace semantics. The latter include ready, failure, (complete) trace, possible futures, ready trace and failure trace semantics for labelled transition systems, and ready, (maximal) failure and (maximal) trace semantics for generative probabilistic systems. This yields a uniform notion of minimal representatives for the various decorated trace equivalences, in terms of final Moore automata. As a consequence, proofs of decorated trace equivalence can be given by coinduction, using different types of (Moore-) bisimulation (up-to context).

This paper deals with the specification problem in classical realizability (such as introduced by Krivine (2009 Panoramas et synthéses27)), which is to characterize the universal realizers of a given formula by their computational behaviour. After recalling the framework of classical realizability, we present the problem in the general case and illustrate it with some examples. In the rest of the paper, we focus on Peirce's law, and present two game-theoretic characterizations of its universal realizers. First, we consider the particular case where the language of realizers contains no extra instruction such as ‘quote’ (Krivine 2003 Theoretical Computer Science308 259–276). We present a first game $\mathds{G}$0 and show that the universal realizers of Peirce's law can be characterized as the uniform winning strategies for $\mathds{G}$0, using the technique of interaction constants. Then we show that in the presence of extra instructions such as ‘quote’, winning strategies for the game $\mathds{G}$0 are still adequate but no more complete. For that, we exhibit an example of a wild realizer of Peirce's law, that introduces a purely game-theoretic form of backtrack that is not captured by $\mathds{G}$0. We finally propose a more sophisticated game $\mathds{G}$1, and show that winning strategies for the game $\mathds{G}$1 are both adequate and complete in the general case, without any further assumption about the instruction set used by the language of classical realizers.

Completeness is a key feature of abstract interpretation. It corresponds to exactness of the abstraction of fix-points and relies upon the need of absence of false alarms in static program analysis. Making abstract interpretation complete is therefore a major problem in approximating the semantics of programming languages. In this paper, we consider the problem of making abstract interpretations complete by minimally modifying the predicate transformer, i.e. the semantics, of a program. We study the mathematical properties of complete functions on complete lattices and prove the existence of minimal transformations of monotone functions to achieve completeness. We then apply minimal complete transformers to prove the minimality of standard program transformations in security, such as static program monitoring.

Induction recursion offers the possibility of a clean, simple and yet powerful meta-language for the type system of a dependently typed programming language. At its crux, induction recursion allows us to define a universe, that is a set U of codes and a decoding function T : U → D which assigns to every code u : U, a value T, u of some type D, e.g. the large type Set of small types or sets. The name induction recursion refers to the build-up of codes in U using inductive clauses, simultaneously with the definition of the function T, by structural recursion on codes.

Our contribution is to (i) bring out explicitly algebraic structure which is less visible in the original type-theoretic presentation – in particular showing how containers and monads play a pivotal role within induction recursion; and (ii) use these structures to present a clean and high level definition of induction recursion suitable for use in functional programming.

We show how systems of session types can enforce interactions to take bounded time for all typable processes. The type system we propose is based on Lafont's soft linear logic and is strongly inspired by recent works about session types as intuitionistic linear logic formulas. Our main result is the existence, for every typable process, of a polynomial bound on the length of reduction sequences starting from it and on the size of its reducts.

A multiparty session forms a unit of structured communication among many participants which follow communication sequences specified as a global type. When a process is engaged in two or more sessions simultaneously, different sessions can be interleaved and can interfere at runtime. Previous work on multiparty session types has ignored session interleaving, providing a limited progress property ensured only within a single session, by assuming non-interference among different sessions and by forbidding delegation. This paper develops, besides a more traditional, compositional communication type system, a novel static interaction type system for global progress in dynamically interleaved and interfered multiparty sessions. The interaction type system infers causalities of channels making sure that processes do not get stuck at intermediate stages of sessions also in presence of delegation.

Session types describe and constrain the input/output behaviour of systems. Existing session typing systems have limited support for polymorphism. For example, existing systems cannot provide the most general type for a generic proxy process that forwards messages between two channels. We provide a polymorphic session typing system for the π calculus, and demonstrate the utility of session-type-level functions in combination with polymorphic session typing. The type system guarantees subject reduction and safety properties, but not deadlock freedom. We describe a formalization of the type system in Coq. The proofs of subject reduction and safety properties, as well as typing of example processes, have been mechanically verified.

We show that the techniques for resource control that have been developed by the so-called light logics can be fruitfully applied also to process algebras. In particular, we present a restriction of higher-order π-calculus inspired by soft linear logic. We prove that any soft process terminates in polynomial time. We argue that the class of soft processes may be naturally enlarged so that interesting processes are expressible, still maintaining the polynomial bound on executions.

Linearity is a multi-faceted and ubiquitous notion in the analysis and development of programming language concepts. We study linearity in a denotational perspective by picking out programs that correspond to linear functions between domains.

We propose a PCF-like language imposing linear constraints on the use of variable to program only linear functions. To entail a full abstraction result, we introduce some higher-order operators related to exception handling and parallel evaluation. We study several notions of operational equivalence and show them to coincide with our language. Finally, we present a new operational evaluation of the language that provides the base for a real implementation. It exploits the denotational linearity to provide an efficient evaluation semantics SECD-like, that avoids the use of closures.

Timed and register automata are well-known models of computation over timed and data words, respectively. The former has clocks that allow to test the lapse of time between two events, whilst the latter includes registers that can store data values for later comparison. Although these two models behave differently in appearance, several decision problems have the same (un)decidability and complexity results for both models. As a prominent example, emptiness is decidable for alternating automata with one clock or register, both with non-primitive recursive complexity. This is not by chance.

This work confirms that there is indeed a tight relationship between the two models. We show that a run of a timed automaton can be simulated by a register automaton over ordered data domain, and conversely that a run of a register automaton can be simulated by a timed automaton. These are exponential time reductions hold both in the finite and infinite words settings. Our results allow to transfer decidability results back and forth between these two kinds of models, as well complexity results modulo an exponential time reduction. We justify the usefulness of these reductions by obtaining new results on register automata.

We present an interdisciplinary effort in the field of global environmental change, related to the understanding of the concept of ‘vulnerability’. We have used functional programming to capture the generic aspects of the myriad of definitions of vulnerability, and have used the resulting formalization to learn something new about vulnerability and to write some better software for vulnerability assessment. In the process, we have also found out something about formalization in general, about the advantages and disadvantages of dependent types, and about the role of computing science in the larger intellectual landscape.

Simply typed λ-calculus with fixpoint combinators, λY-calculus, offers an interesting method for approximating program semantics. The Böhm tree of a λY-term represents the meaning of the program up to the meaning of built-in constants. It is much easier to reason about properties of such trees than properties of interpreted programs. Moreover, some interesting properties of programs are already expressible on the level of these trees.

Collapsible pushdown automata (CPDA) give another way of generating the same class of trees as λY-terms. We clarify the relationship between the two models. In particular, we present two relatively simple translations from λY-terms to CPDA using Krivine machines as an intermediate step. The latter are general machines for describing computation of the weak head normal form in the λ-calculus. They provide the notions of closure and environment that facilitate reasoning about computation.

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.

Given a synchronous system, we study the question whether – or, under which conditions – the behaviour of that system can be realized by a (non-trivially) distributed and hence asynchronous implementation. In this paper, we partially answer this question by examining the role of causality for the implementation of synchrony in two fundamental different formalisms of concurrency, Petri nets and the π-calculus. For both formalisms it turns out that each ‘good’ encoding of synchronous interactions using just asynchronous interactions introduces causal dependencies in the translation.

Session types and contracts are two formalisms used to study client–server protocols. In this paper, we study the relationship between them. The main result is the existence of a fully abstract model of session types; this model is based on a natural interpretation of these types into a subset of contracts.

Event-driven programming is one of the major paradigms in concurrent and communication-based programming, where events are typically detected as the arrival of messages on asynchronous channels. Unfortunately, the flexibility and performance of traditional event-driven programming come at the cost of more complex programs: low-level APIs and the obfuscation of event-driven control flow make programs difficult to read, write and verify.

This paper introduces a π-calculus with session types that models event-driven session programming (called ESP) and studies its behavioural theory. The main characteristics of the ESP model are asynchronous, order-preserving message passing, non-blocking detection of event/message arrivals and dynamic inspection of session types. Session types offer formal safety guarantees, such as communication and event handling safety, and programmatic benefits that overcome problems with existing event-driven programming languages and techniques. The new typed bisimulation theory developed for the ESP model is distinct from standard synchronous or asynchronous bisimulation, capturing the semantic nature of eventful session-based processes. The bisimilarity coincides with reduction-closed barbed congruence.

We demonstrate the features and benefits of ESP and the behavioural theory through two key use cases. First, we examine an encoding and the semantic behaviour of the event selector, a central component of general event-driven systems, providing core results for verifying type-safe event-driven applications. Second, we examine the Lauer–Needham duality, building on the selector encoding and bisimulation theory to prove that a systematic transformation from multithreaded to event-driven session processes is type- and semantics-preserving.

We show that the proof-theoretic notion of logical preorder coincides with the process-theoretic notion of barbed preorder for a CCS-like process calculus obtained from the formula-as-process interpretation of a fragment of linear logic. The argument makes use of other standard notions in process algebra, namely simulation and labelled transition systems. This result establishes a connection between an approach to reason about process specifications, the barbed preorder, and a method to reason about logic specifications, the logical preorder.