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Abstract for Seminar

The pi-calculus is based on two ideas: name passing and basic forms of composition of processes. Through the study of many researchers, a stunning expressive power of this combination has been uncovered for representing dynamics and algebra of diverse classes of computation, ranging over sequential, concurrent, distributed and even biological systems. Through these studies it has also been found that several notions of types naturally arise in these representations, which affect basic elements of theory of processes, such as process equivalences.

Recently Berger, Yoshida and I found that a use of a simple notion of types, suggested from Linear Logic and game semantics, can make the representation of known programming languages semantically exact. This shows one prominent use of types, where types make the pi-calculus a powerful tool for representation and analysis of programming languages, though this is far from the only possible uses of types for name passing processes - by adding structure, good notions of types profoundly affect statics, dynamics and semantics of processes.

In this talk, I will illustrate how and why the use of types makes the pi-calculus a powerful tool, especially in the context of representation of software, and how we can apply such representation to practice, both through concrete examples. Among other things, I shall focus on basic ideas of typing, how behavioural theories can be affected, how dynamics is affected, and how they can be applied in practice. As a concrete example of applications, I will briefly illustrate our recent experience in using the linear/affine pi-calculus for a type-based security analysis for a concurrent imperative programming language, which has given rise to a more powerful analysis for such languages than has been known before.

Computer Science @ Kent

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