Title: Computations and Interaction

Abstract:

We enhance the notion of a computation of the classical theory of computing with the notion of interaction. In this way, we enhance a Turing machine as a model of computation to a Reactive Turing Machine that is an abstract model of a computer as it is used nowadays, always interacting with the user and the world.

Biodata:

Jos Baeten graduated in mathematical logic at Utrecht University in 1978. He has an M.Sc. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in mathematics of the University of Minnesota (USA). He worked at the Technical University of Delft (1983-1984), at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam (1984-1985 and 1989-1991) and at the University of Amsterdam (1985-1991), before getting appointed in 1991 as full professor of computer science at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e).

In 2010, he switched to the Department of Mechanical Engineering at TU/e as full professor of systems engineering. He is well-known as a researcher in formal methods and theoretical computer science, in particular in process algebra and its applications. To date, he supervised 26 Ph.D. degrees. He is

scientific director of the national research school Institute for Programming research and Algorithmics (1996-2004 and as of 2009), he was dean of the department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the TU/e (1996-1999 and 2002-2004), initiated the Embedded Systems Institute in Eindhoven (1996), and was scientific director of the TU/e institute of post-master education SAI (2002-2004). He was visiting professor at the Università di Camerino (2004), Università di Pisa (2004), Università di Bologna (2005), all in Italy, and the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (2006) in Argentina. He chairs the steering committee of the CONCUR conferences and is a member of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (Royal Holland
Society of Sciences and Humanities).

Title of talk: Protecting Critical Infrastructures While Preserving Each Organization's Autonomy

Abstract:

In critical infrastructures (CIs), different organizations must cooperate, while being mutually suspicious since they have different interests and can be in competition on some markets. Moreover, in most cases, there is no recognized authority that can impose global security rules to all participating organizations. In such a context, it is difficult to apply good security practices to the interconnected information systems that control the critical infrastructure. In this paper, we present the PolyOrBAC security framework, aimed at securing global infrastructures while preserving each participating organization's autonomy. In this framework, each organization is able to protect its assets by de fining its own security policy and enforcing it by its own security mechanisms, and the global infrastructure is protected by controlling and auditing all interactions between participating organizations. PolyOrBAC helps to satisfy the CII security requirements related to secure cooperation, autonomy and con dentiality, monitoring and audit, and scalability.

Biodata:

Yves Deswarte is currently a Research Director of CNRS, member of the "Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance" research group at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, France. Successively at CII, CIMSA, INRIA and LAAS, his research work has dealt mainly with fault-tolerance and security in distributed computing systems. Recently, his main research interests were in intrusion tolerance, quantitative security evaluation, dependability evaluation criteria, protection of safety-critical systems with multiple levels of integrity, flexible security policies for critical infrastructure protection, and privacy-preserving authorization schemes. He is the author or co-author of more than 150 international publications in these areas. He is a “Membre Émérite” of SEE, a member of the IEEE TC on Security and Privacy and a member of the ACM SIGSAC. He is representing the IEEE Computer Society at IFIP TC-11 (Technical Committee on Security and Privacy Protection in Information Processing Systems).

Abstract

In this paper we discuss our ongoing endeavour to apply notations and algorithms based on the pi-calculus and its theories for the development of large-scale distributed systems. The execution of a large scale distributed system consists of many structured conversations (or sessions) whose protocols can be clearly and accurately specified using a theory of types for the pi-calculus, called session types. The proposed methodology promotes a formally founded, and highly structured, development framework for modelling and building distributed applications, from high-level models to design and implementation to static checking to runtime validation. At the centre of this methodology is a formal description language for representing protocols for interactions, called Scribble. We illustrate the usage and theoretical basis of this language through use cases from different application domains.

Biodata:

Kohei Honda works in the field of mobile processes, types and logics. In 1991, he introduced, with Tokoro, the asynchronous version of the pi-calculus which is the simplest known syntax of this calculus with full expressive power. He later developed, with Berger and Yoshida, the linear/affine type disciplines for the calculus which can faithfully embed programming languages. In 1998, he introduced session types for the pi-calculus, with Vasconcelos, Kubo and Takeuchi. His recent work includes type-based secrecy for a wide class of programming languages based on the pi-calculus, co- authored with Vasconcelos and Yoshida, program logics for imperative higher-order functions which extends to concurrency, solving some of the open problems in program logics. He has been active in an application of the pi-calculus and its type theory to major standardizations and development projects via collaborations with industry partners, including the W3C standardization for Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL); ISO standardization for international financial protocols (ISO TC68 WG4); and Ocean Observatories Initiative, a large NSF-funded cyber infrastructure Project.

Abstract:

Membrane Computing is a natural computing paradigm aiming to abstract computing models from the structure and functioning of the living cell as well as from the cooperation of cells in tissues, organs and other populations of cells. This direction of research was initiated by Gh. Paun in November 1998. In the last twelve years, the area has grown substantially: initial research focussed on understanding computability aspects using formal language theoretic elements, and using membrane computing as a parallel computing device capable of solving intractable problems; over the years, membrane computing has been found useful in modelling biological processes, simulating ecosystems, and also finds some applications in areas like economics, computer graphics and approximate optimization. Off late, complexity classes (time, space) of membrane systems and their connection with the classical complexity classes have been investigated. The connection of membrane computing with other areas like petri nets, brane calculi, process algebra, dynamical systems, X-machines and models based on fuzzy sets is an active and important recent line of research. In this paper, we give a
high level overview of the research in membrane computing over the last 12 years.

Biodata:

Krishna Shankara Narayanan is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Bombay. Prior to joining IIT Bombay, she was a research scholar at IIT Madras. Her research interests are in the areas of Membrane Computing, Automata, Logics and Games.

Abstract:

A linear process is a system of events and states related by an inner product, on which are defined the behaviorally motivated operations of tensor product or orthocurrence, sum or concurrence, sequence, and choice. Linear process algebra or LPA is the theory of this framework. LPA resembles Girard’s linear logic with the differences attributable to its focus on behavior instead of proof. As with MLL the multiplicative part can be construed via the Curry-Howard isomorphism as an enrichment of Boolean algebra. The additives cater for independent concurrency or parallel play. The traditional sequential operations of sequence and choice exploit process-specific state information catering for notions of transition and cancellation.

Biodata:

Vaughan Pratt received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Sydney University and his Ph.D. from Stanford under Donald Knuth in 1971, for whom he then worked as a postdoc before teaching at MIT and later Stanford from 1972 to 2000, graduating 14 Ph.D. students with 38 descendants. His research interests during that period included natural language processing, algorithms, logics of programs, concurrency modelling, algebraic logic, workstations, computer graphics, digital typography, and speech recognition. At Stanford he directed the Sun workstation project from 1980 to 1982, taking a leave of absence from 1983 to 1985 to serve as Director of Research at Sun Microsystems. Since 2000 he has been emeritus at Stanford while pursuing interests in ultramobile PCs, climate physics, autonomous vehicles, and universal algebra.

Abstract:

The technical capacities of service offers for e-government and e-particpation have considerably progressed over the last years. Yet, the principles of good governance are still not well implemented especially when it comes to policy development. Governments struggle to effectively apply innovative technologies in regards to providing open collaboration in policy formulation or to monitor and evaluate policy implementation. Through a recent initiative of the European Commission, several research projects have been launched to address these challenges. In my invited talk, I will investigate existing deficiencies in open government towards transparent policy development and I will present the approach of a project funded by theEC to develop better ICT support for open collaboration in policy modelling thereby combining existing e-participation tools, collaborative scenario generation and formal policy modelling to evaluate and explore policies via agent-based modelling (OCOPOMO - www.ocopomo.eu).

Biodata:

Maria A. Wimmer is full professor for eGovernment and and Head of the Research Group eGovernment at the Institut for Information Systems Research, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. She studied Computer Sciences, initially worked in the area of holistic design of safety critical systems for train traffic control (two year's research stay in Italy) and turned her focus onto ICT in the public sector in 1999. In 2004-2005, she worked in the Austrian Federal Chancellery within the ICT CIO department. End of 2005, she became professor for eGovernment at the Faculty of Computer Science in Koblenz. With her research group, she is engaged in numerous research and implementation projects co-financed by the EC and by regional and local governments. The projects range from strategic and foresight research to implementation projects such as for public online procurement or e- participation. She thereby applies a holistic systems analysis and design and investigates aspects of interoperability, legal compliance, policy compliance, organisational change, evaluation and measurement as well as usability and usefulness for the user. Maria Wimmer co-organizes several international conferences, among them the annual international EGOV conferences. She chairs the IFIP WG 8.5 on Information Systems in the Public Sector and the German Society of Informatics working group on Informatics in law and governments=(RVI). Apart from that, she is member of ACM, IEEE, AIS and the Austrian Computer Society. Her numerous publications include recent works on evaluation and assessment of eGovernment and eParticipation projects, future strategy planning of e-government and e-participation, information and process analysis in public sector, standardisation and interoperability.