Writing your PhD thesis is a huge work (took me nine months). A burden. Everyone wants it to be THE document that the next generation will read in order to learn the wonderful stuff you have developed at IRIF.

Clearly, there are some pitfalls to avoid. Sometimes a scientifically excellent thesis turns out to be barely usable, because definitions are difficult to find, hard to parse, etc… And the reviewers get mad at you (but say it gently because they are polite). It is your duty to pay attention to all these details (it is also the duty of your PhD advisor to help you in that) and make a document as user friendly as possible.

One can find many documents describing how to write good science/a good thesis on the internet (read some of them!). I will not try to cover this wide subject. My goal in this talk will be to emphasize on some presentation points, and show you how some tools can help you in your writing (this is an advertisement for the LaTeX package « knowledge »).

If you want to test, you can bring your laptop with an up-to-date distribution of LaTeX.

Given a cake (identified with the interval [0,1]) and players with different tastes, the envy-free cake-cutting problem asks for a partition of the cake into connected pieces so that it is possible to assign the pieces to the players without making any of them jealous. The Stromquist-Woodall theorem ensures the existence of such an envy-free division under mild conditions. Recently, Segal-Halevi asked whether these conditions could be even further relaxed by allowing that some players dislike the cake (e.g., they know the cake has been poisoned). In the traditional setting, all players are “hungry”, and always prefer to get something instead of nothing. We provide a partial answer to that question and propose also other extensions, e.g., when suddenly one player disappears.

Based on joint work with Florian Frick, Kelsey Houston-Edwards, Francis E. Su, Shira Zerbib.

IRIF Cake^TM is an amazing opportunity to meet people while simultaneously eating cakes baked by your fellow colleagues! Join us every Thursday, at 5pm, in front of room 3052 (Sophie Germain 3rd floor) for a weekly feast. You can also express your cooking skills and volunteer to bake a cake by sending an email to cake@irif.fr.

11:00 – 12:30 Éric Tanter (Universidad de Chile & Inria Paris) - Invited talk: Abstracting Gradual Typing: Principles and Application to Gradual Parametricity

  Gradual typing enables programming languages to seamlessly combine dynamic and static checking. Language researchers and designers have extended a wide variety of type systems to support gradual typing. These efforts consistently demonstrate that designing a satisfactory gradual counterpart to a static type system is challenging, and this challenge only increases with the sophistication of the type system. Gradual type system designers need more formal tools to help them conceptualize, structure, and evaluate their designs. Based on an understanding of gradual types as abstractions of static types, we have developed systematic foundations for gradual typing based on abstract interpretation, called Abstracting Gradual Typing (AGT for short). Gradual languages designed with the AGT approach satisfy, by construction, the established criteria for gradually-typed languages. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to AGT in a simply-typed setting, and will then discuss recent work on a gradual counterpart of System F that enforces relational parametricity, even in the presence of imprecise types.

14:00 – 15:00 Flavien Breuvart (Université Paris 13) - Invited talk: Graded Types Parametricity : Principles and Application to Abstract Interpretation

  In this talk, we will briefly present the yet-to-start project CoGITARe, which aims at developing further graded types expressivity and inference in order to use them to perform abstract interpretations.
  In a second time, we give an historic on graded type systems and their expressivity. Then, we will see that this expressivity is limited by a lake of dependency/parametricity. We will thus explore two ongoing research directions that adds two very different kind of parametricity to graded types.
  (The provocative title should only be taken as a joke. Despite their apparent similitudes, this work and Éric Tanter's have vastly different objectives and involved different issues and techniques. In particular, notice that gradual and graded types are fundamentally different.)

15:30 – 16:30 Shane Mansfield (Univ. of Oxford) - Invited talk: An overview of empirical models

  Empirical models are a way of formalising data that arises in physical experiments. They were first proposed by Abramsky and Brandenburger as part of a framework to analyse fundamentally non-classical phenomena in quantum systems. Conveniently from a computer science perspective, they abstract away from the mathematical baggage of quantum theory and instead allow the key phenomena to be characterised purely as features of empirical data. After introducing the basic framework I will discuss some more recent results and developments, drawing on joint work with a number of collaborators. In particular: quantum computations can simply be modelled as classical computations with the additional ability to interact with a resource empirical model; quantitative measures of non-classicality can be shown to relate directly to some basic quantum-over-classical computational advantages; and the beginnings of a category-theoretic approach to reasoning about empirical models have emerged.

18:00 – 19:00 Xavier Leroy - Lecture: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France

  This is not part of the CHoCoLa day, but you might be interested in attending! See https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/xavier-leroy/inaugural-lecture-2018-11-15-18h00.htm

  The meeting will take place in Bâtiment Sophie Germain, here.
  We will first gather at the 3rd floor of the building, for a breakfast.
  We will then move for the talk of the morning (11.00-12.30) to Amphi Turing.
  We will have lunch in room 3052
  In the afternoon (14h-16h30), we will be in room 1016

An atomic cross-chain swap is a distributed coordination task where multiple parties exchange assets across multiple blockchains, for example, trading bitcoin for ether. An atomic swap protocol guarantees (1) if all parties conform to the protocol, then all swaps take place, (2) if some coalition deviates from the protocol, then no conforming party ends up worse off, and (3) no coalition has an incentive to deviate from the protocol. A cross-chain swap is modeled as a directed graph D, whose vertexes are parties and whose arcs are proposed asset transfers. For any pair (D,L), where D=(V,A) is a strongly-connected directed graph and L⊂V a feedback vertex set for D, we give an atomic cross-chain swap protocol for D, using a form of hashed timelock contracts, where the vertexes in L generate the hashlocked secrets. We show that no such protocol is possible if D is not strongly connected, or if D is strongly connected but L is not a feedback vertex set.

The Pascal triangle and the corresponding Sierpinski gasket are well-studied objects. They exhibit self-similarity features and have connections with dynamical systems, cellular automata, number theory and automatic sequences in combinatorics on words. In this talk, I will first recall the well-known link between those two objects. Then I will exploit it to define Pascal-like triangles associated with different numeration systems, and their analogues of the Sierpinski gasket. This a work in collaboration with Julien Leroy and Michel Rigo (University of Liège, Belgium).