21.12.2018 Frederic Magniez (IRIF) will present at QIP 2019 a quantum distributed algorithm to compute the diameter of a quantum distributed congested network. This is the first quantum distributed algorithm that overcomes classical algorithms for this task. 19.12.2018 Fabian Reiter now at LSV was awarded the Honorable Mention of the Gilles Kahn prize for his PhD Distributed Automata and Logic supervised by Olivier Carton at IRIF. 13.12.2018 Constantin Enea (IRIF) will present at POPL 2019 a methodology for specifying software modules whose operations satisfy multiple consistency levels. This work has revealed previously unknown documentation errors and bugs in Java concurrent objects. 9.12.2018 The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has honored Ahmed Bouajjani (IRIF) with the prestigious Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Award, in recognition of his research contributions. 3.12.2018 Maybe you are an eager bitcoin miner? Maybe you are a fan of quantum computing too, and you wonder what will change in the mining competition when done by quantum computers? Find some answers in a paper coauthored by Miklos Santha (IRIF) to be presented at ITCS’19. 1.12.2018 Matthieu Sozeau (IRIF) will give a seminar at Collège de France as part of the lectures of Xavier Leroy (Collège de France) on Software Science, December 12. 1.12.2018 Hugues Fauconnier (IRIF) will give a seminar at Collège de France as part of the annual Chair of Rachid Guerraoui (EPFL) on Distributed Algorithms, December 21. 29.11.2018 Constantin Enea from IRIF organizes with Ruzica Piskac (Yale University), the 20th International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2019). The conference is preceded by a winter school on formal methods. 21.11.2018 Two papers coauthored by IRIF members will be presented at ITCS’19, a prestigious conference to promote research that carries a strong and innovative conceptual message in TCS. Topics include communication complexity and quantum dueling algorithms. 20.11.2018 Two papers coauthored by IRIF members will be presented at QIP’19, the main conference for theoretical quantum information research. Topics include efficient quantum algorithms for both algebraic and distributed problems. 20.11.2018 One paper coauthored by Laurent Feuilloley while he was PhD student at IRIF will be presented at SODA’19, the main conference in algorithm design. The paper provides lower bounds for the fundamental problem of text indexing with mismatches and differences using the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. 19.11.2018 IRIF has the great pleasure to welcome Mahsa Shirmohammadi, researcher scientist (CNRS) from LIS, who is visiting IRIF for six months and who is an expert in the analysis and verification of timed, counter and probabilistic systems. 17.11.2018 Four papers coauthored by IRIF members will be presented at POPL’19, the main conference on programming languages and programming systems. The papers' topics are game semantics, proof theory, gradual typing, and consistency for concurrent computations. Games, gradual typing, proofs, consistency Games are mathematical objects used for modeling situations in which several participants/players interact, and each of them aims at fulfilling a personal goal. Real games such as chess or go are cases in which there are two players which are opponents. Games occur in computer science for modeling the logical duality between conjunction and disjunctions, or for defining particular families of complexity classes. Games appear in verification for describing how a system has to react to the environment (the opponent) in order to perform what it has been designed for. Gradual typing is a technique that allows the programmer to control which parts of a program check their type correctness (i.e., that apples are added to apples) before execution and which parts check it during their execution instead. It is often used to gradually add the before-execution check to dynamic languages, like JavaScript, which perform the check only at run-time, since it is generally better to find errors before the execution of a program rather than during its execution. Proof theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies proofs as mathematical objects. In particular, proof are syntactic constructions built from axioms and inference rules. Relevant to computer science are the studies of computational and complexity aspects of proofs. Memory consistency models characterize the effect of concurrent invocations to a library implementing a shared state, e.g., a queue or a key-value map. Strong consistency means that the results of concurrently-executed invocations match the results of some serial execution of those same invocations. Since strong consistency carries a significant penalty on performance, modern implementations provide weaker guarantees known as weak consistency models, e.g., eventual or causal consistency. 12.11.2018 IRIF and PCQC are partners in the EU Flagship project Quantum Internet Alliance (QIA) and in charge of delivering the QIA's blueprint for the future of quantum communications. The EU selected nineteen research projects, and ten of them are based on French teams. 10.11.2018 The first meeting of the French-Chinese research project Verification Interaction Proof will take place in Paris at IRIF on November 19-24. Registration is free but mandatory. 10.11.2018 We are delighted to host as part of our IRIF Distinguished Talks Series Maurice Helihy (Brown University) on Nov. 16, 10:30 for a talk entitled “Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps”. 10.11.2018 The last plenary meeting of GDRI Logique Linéaire takes place at IRIF, December 3-5. The program consists of talks given by members of the GDRI. 9.11.2018 The first session of a series of seminars Graph Theory in Paris will be hosted by IRIF. There will be two seminars by Monique Laurent and Lex Schrijver on November 23, at 2pm, in Amphi Turing of Sophie Germain building. 5.11.2018 Amélie Gheerbrand and Cristina Sirangelo from IRIF co-organize with L. Libkin, L. Segoufin, and P. Senellart, the 2019 Spring School on Theoretical Computer Science (EPIT) on Databases, Logic and Automata, to happen the 7-12 April 2019 in Marseille. Preregistration before 13 January 2019. 5.11.2018 The Journées PPS 2018 will take place on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 November, room 3052, building Sophie Germain. 12.10.2018 IRIF has the great pleasure to welcome a new assistant professor (Paris Diderot): Adrien Guatto, an expert in synchronous languages, typed functional programming, and categorical semantics. 12.10.2018 IRIF has the great pleasure to welcome a new research scientist (CNRS): Claire Mathieu, an expert in algorithms, particularly the design of approximation schemes for NP-hard combinatorial. 12.10.2018 IRIF has the great pleasure to welcome a new professor (Paris Diderot): Pierluigi Crescenzi, an expert in graph algorithms, particularly in the analysis of real-world complex networks. 10.10.2018 IRIF has the great pleasure to welcome a new assistant professor (Paris Diderot): Daniela Petrisan, an expert in categories, co-algebra and automata. 9.10.2018 The paper “Equivalences for Free : Univalent Parametricity for Effective Transport” of Matthieu Sozeau (IRIF), with his coauthors Nicolas Tabareau and Eric Tanter, has been selected as a distinguished paper of the ICFP conference. 8.10.2018 On October 8-11 IRIF organizes a joint meeting of 3 projects which are closely related: GDRI-LL, CRECOGI, and ELICA. Everybody is welcome to attend. 8.10.2018 Jean Krivine (researcher at IRIF) will lead a public debate about Artificial Intelligence at the “Festival Maths en Ville” of Saint-Denis. It will take place on the 11/10/2018 at the theater “L'écran”, starting at 19.30. 7.10.2018 IRIF is having its back-to-work-day on October 15th. In the morning, there will be a PhD student session, and in the afternoon a series of talks given by new faculty and CNRS members. 7.10.2018 Jean-Eric Pin, CNRS senior researcher at IRIF, is awarded the Arto Salomaa prize for his outstanding contribution to the field of Automata Theory. 5.10.2018 IRIF is seeking excellent candidates for about 10 postdoctoral positions in all areas of the Foundations of Computer Science. 4.10.2018 In an article of October of Communications of the ACM, Jean-François Abramatic, Roberto Di Cosmo (IRIF) and Stefano Zacchiroli (IRIF) explain the mission of the Software Heritage project. 15.9.2018 IRIF co-organizes the Workshop on Emergent Algorithms and Network Dynamics (Wendy) that will take place at Institut Henri-Poincaré in Paris on October 10-11, 2018. Registration is free but mandatory. 14.9.2018 The October 2, IRIF organizes the next Annual workshop of the French Working Group on Complexity and Algorithms (CoA). This year, the workshop will consist of a series of introductory and survey talks about various hot topics in algorithms, including Blockchains, Machine Learning, Sum-of-Square, etc. 11.9.2018 Back-to-work day of the "Algorithms and discrete structures" pole, which gathers the research groups Algorithms and complexity, Combinatorics, Complex Systems, Networks, and Distributed Computing and Theory and algorithmics of graphs on September 11, 2018, room 3059, 9h30-16h15. 7.9.2018 The EU QuantAlgo project workshop will be held in Paris at IRIF September 25-28, 2018. This is a joint workshop with the IRIF-IQC Cooperation project between CNRS and U. Waterloo. QuantAlgo project aims to combine research on the fundamentals of quantum algorithms with the development of new applications. 4.9.2018 IRIF organizes the workshop Quantifiers and duality that will take place at Amphi Turing (building Sophie Germain, University Paris Diderot) on the 2018/09/11. Registration is free but mandatory. 9.8.2018 IRIF organizes the 7th FILOFOCS (French-Israeli Laboratory on Foundations of Computer Science) workshop which will be held at the institut Henri Poincaré (IHP), on 3-5 October, 2018. A preliminary list of speakers in now available and registration (mandatory, but free) is now open. 1.8.2018 At the occasion of the retirement of Michel Habib and in celebration of his achievements, IRIF organizes a two-day conference “40 années d'algorithmique de graphes”, 11-12 Oct, Amphi Turing (Sophie Germain, Univ. Paris Diderot). Free mandatory registration. 29.7.2018 IRIF organizes the 59th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2018) on October 7-9, 2018. FOCS is a leading annual conference in Theoretical Computer Science, and has served in the last 60 years as a venue for announcing the major scientific advances in the field. The list of accepted papers is now available, and the registration is now open (deadline for early rate: September 9, 2018). 29.7.2018 Ludovic Patey was awarded the Prix Thiessé de Rosemont / Demassieux for his PhD thesis « Les mathématiques à rebours de théorèmes de type Ramsey », supervised by Laurent Bienvenu and Hugo Herbelin. 10.7.2018 Mihaela Sighireanu (IRIF) is organizing the second edition of SL-COMP, a competition of solvers for separation logic. The final results will be presented at ADSL 2018, a workshop of FLOC2018, which will take place in Oxford on the 13.07.18. separation logic Separation logic is a language for describing properties and reasoning about programs that use mutable data structures (i.e. memory cells and pointers). Separation logic has a special support for local reasoning, which is the ability to use and compose properties that involve a subset of the data configuration only: it separates the relevant portion of the data structure from the irrelevant one. Local reasoning gives more compact proofs and specifications for imperative programs than with prior formalisms. Furthermore, it helps with the scalability of proofs done in automatic and semi-automatic verification and program analysis tools. 6.7.2018 Mihaela Sighireanu (IRIF) is co-chair of the 18th International Workshop on Automated Verification of Critical Systems (AVOCS) which will take place in Oxford from 18.07.18 to 19.07.18 as part of FLOC2018. 29.6.2018 Raphaëlle Crubillé (PhD student IRIF) will present at LICS 2018 an analytic account of the discrete probabilities fragment of a denotational model for higher-order programming with general probabilities, hopefully a first step towards proving that this model is fully abstract. fully abstract The quest for a fully abstract model for the contextual equivalence of PCF, a paradigmatic functional language, has been influential in the area of programming languages semantics. A model is fully abstract if it is both sound and complete. A denotational model is complete for a given notion of equivalence between programs if equivalent programs have the same denotation, some mathematical object they are mapped to; it is sound if programs having the same denotation are equivalent. 27.6.2018 Berenice Delcroix-Oger (IRIF) participated to the annual festival Salon Culture & Jeux Mathématiques 2018. On the following video (1:50), she presents a funny game where mathematics help you perform magic tricks! 15.6.2018 Amina Doumane (former PhD student at IRIF, now at LIP) was awarded the Ackermann prize of EACSL for her PhD thesis entitled On the infinitary proof theory of logics with fixed points. 6.6.2018 We are delighted to host as part of our IRIF Distinguished Talks Series Christos Papadimitriou (Columbia University) on July 13, 10:30 for a talk entitled “A computer scientist thinks about the Brain”. 6.6.2018 Today Roberto Di Cosmo (professor at IRIF) with a ceremony at UNESCO opened to the public the archives of Softwareheritage.org, a worldwide initiative to create a universal library of computer programme source codes since the dawn of the digital age. 6.6.2018 Delia Kesner (IRIF) and Matthieu Sozeau (IRIF) will both give invited talks entitled “Multi Types for Higher-Order languages” and “The Predicative, Polymorphic Calculus of Cumulative Inductive Constructions and its implementation” at TYPES 2018, held in Braga (Portugal), June 18-21. 1.6.2018 Claire Mathieu (IRIF associate member) organizes a 1-day colloquium on Approximation algorithms and networks at Collège de France on June 7. This is part of the Chair in Informatics and Computational Sciences at College de France in association with INRIA. approximation algorithm The approximation algorithms are algorithms that produce a solution that approximates the best possible solution of an optimization problem. While finding the optimal solution of practical problems is often infeasible, an approximation algorithm usually produces its solution in an efficient way and provides formal guarantees about the quality of the approximation. An example of such a problem is the so-called “traveling salesman problem” which consists in finding among all possible itineraries the shortest route that allows a salesman to visit a given set of cities and come back home. 1.6.2018 Adi Rosén (IRIF) will give a talk during a 1-day colloquium at Collège de France as part of the annual Chair of Claire Mathieu (IRIF associate member) on Algorithms, June 7. 31.5.2018 Paul-André Melliès (IRIF) will present at LICS 2018 his work on ribbon tensorial logic, a primary logic designed to reveal the secret topology of reasoning. This is the first time that logical proofs are faithfully translated into topological tangles using functorial knot theory. knot theory Knot theory studies mathematical knots. These are like the usual shoelaces and rope knots but with the difference that the ends of the string are joined together so that it cannot be undone. Of particular interest is the study of when two knots are equivalent, that is when one can be transformed into the other without cutting the string or passing the string through itself. The theory has applications in physics, biology, chemistry, and computer science. For instance, the security of some quantum money relies on the assumption that given two different looking but equivalent knots, it is difficult to explicitly find a transformation that takes one to the other. 30.5.2018 « Tous femmes de numérique ! » Après leur rencontre avec 4 informaticiennes de l’IRIF, 14 lycéennes du Lycée Jules Ferry ont expliqué à leurs camarades l’exposition permanente du Palais de la découverte sur l’informatique et les sciences du numérique le 29/05. 25.5.2018 Marie Kerjean (PhD student IRIF) will present at LICS 2018 a logical account for linear partial differential equations. With this work, she unveils a bridge between mathematical physics and proof theory, paving the way for exciting and mutually beneficial transfers of techniques. sequent A sequent represents a theorem by a sequence of hypotheses and the sequence of possible theses they imply. This formalism underlines a symmetry hypotheses/theses ruled by negation and is used in sequent calculus to formalise proofs and to study their properties. 21.5.2018 Pierre Vial (IRIF) will present at LiCS 2018 an excerpt of his PhD work at IRIF proving that every lambda-term has an infinite linear representation in the infinitary relational model. This work pioneers a technique that allows giving a semantic even to unproductive programs. unproductive A part of a program is unproductive if it performs an infinite number of computing steps without any interaction with the rest of the program or external devices. Unproductive code is basically useless, and may even be unsafe, and detecting parts of code that are unproductive is important to improve software quality. 11.5.2018 Amos Korman (IRIF) Amos Korman is co-chairing, and organizing the 6th Workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms, to be held in London in July, the 23rd. biological algorithm Biological algorithm is a term used to describe the biological processes from an algorithmic, or computer scientific, perspective. It concerns questions such as what are the algorithmic challenges faced by the biological organism, and what are the algorithmic principals used in order to overcome these challenges. For example, when a group of ants finds a large piece of food and needs to decide its navigation rout back to the nest, what are the benefits and pitfalls of noise in their communication? 4.5.2018 Miklos Santha (IRIF) participates to the conference-debate Calcul, communication, simulation et métrologie quantiques : des principes aux réalisations concrètes organized by Académie des sciences at the Institut de France on May 15. 27.4.2018 IRIF is proud to announce that Delia Kesner, professor of University Paris Diderot and researcher at IRIF, was appointed senior member of IUF. 23.4.2018 Six papers coauthored by IRIF members will be presented at the prestigious conference LICS'18 in Oxford this summer. Topics range from λ-calculus, to Separation Logic… 6.4.2018 Victor Lanvin (PhD student of Giuseppe Castagna, IRIF) is awarded the Google PhD fellowship! Through the FSMP, Google will give a significant support to Victor's research work on gradual typing. gradual typing Gradual typing is a technique that allows the programmer to control which parts of a program check their type correctness (i.e., that apples are added to apples) before execution and which parts check it during their execution instead. It is often used to gradually add the before-execution check to dynamic languages, like JavaScript, which perform the check only at run-time, since it is generally better to find errors before the execution of a program rather than during its execution. 3.4.2018 The conference Numeration 2018 will be held on May 22-25 at the University Paris Diderot, and is organized by Valérie Berthé, Christiane Frougny and Wolfgang Steiner from IRIF. 21.3.2018 “The Kappa platform for rule-based modeling”, a collaboration between Jean Krivine (IRIF) and researchers from Harvard University, ENS and Santa Cruz University will be presented at ISMB2018. 21.3.2018 The next meeting of the ANR project DELTA, conducting research about the new challenges in Logic, Automata and Transducers, will take place at University Paris Diderot from 2018/03/26 to 2018/03/28. Scientific talks are public. automaton An automaton is a construct made of states designed to determine if a sequence of inputs should be accepted or rejected. It starts from initial state and when it receives a new input it moves to another state according to the way it was programmed. If at the end of all inputs the automaton is in a state designated as final, then the sequence of inputs is accepted, otherwise it is rejected. 21.3.2018 The next meeting of the ANR project DESCARTES, aiming at defining a modular approach for distributed computing, will take place at IRIF on March 28, 2018. Scientific talks are public. 8.3.2018 In the scope of the IRIF Distinguished Talks Series Monika Henzinger (University of Vienna) will give on April 13 a talk on “The state of the art in dynamic graph algorithms”. algorithm Algorithm: an algorithm is the formal description of a procedure that is used to solve a class of problems. The description consists in a sequence (of finite length) of operations that are interpreted unambiguously by who/what is executing the algorithm. Every algorithm can be directly executed or simulated by any Turing-complete system. 2.3.2018 Adrian Kosowski (IRIF), together with Bartek Dudek (University of Wroclaw), will present at STOC 2018 a new protocol for spreading information in a population. This is the first time that methods of oscillatory dynamics are used to solve a basic task of information dissemination. information dissemination Information dissemination is the process by which a piece of information is propagated in a distributed system through direct communications from node to node. Rumor spreading between humans or broadcasting in a network are two typical examples. Information propagation is a basic building block of many distributed algorithms and its analysis is often critical in understanding their complexity. 27.2.2018 Constantin Enea (IRIF) is an organizer of the 2018 edition of the EPIT research school, on the subject of software verification, to he held in Aussois on May 7-11 2018. 27.2.2018 FSMP offers 20 PhD student positions in Maths and TCS under H2020 COFUND project MathInParis. As a member of the FSMP network, IRIF is an eligible hosting lab. Call for application is open until April, 1st 2018. Applicants must be international students, but master students already in France for less than a year are eligible. 7.2.2018 Peter Habermehl (IRIF) and Benedikt Bollig (LSV, ENS Paris-Saclay) organize the research school MOVEP (Modelling and Verification of Parallel Processes), on July 16-20 in Cachan. 5.2.2018 Université Paris Diderot has opened three permanent positions in Computer Science (1 professor on Graph and applications, 1 assistant professor on Software Science, 1 assistant professor on Data Science). Recruited researchers will join IRIF. 4.2.2018 Laurent Viennot (IRIF, Inria) is Scientific Curator of the exhibition Informatique et sciences du numérique, at Palais de la découverte, starting March 13, 2018. 2.2.2018 Amina Doumane, now at LIP, was awarded the “La Recherche” prize in the Computer Science category for her paper entitled Constructive Completeness for the linear-time mu-calculus, a work accomplished during her PhD at IRIF and that appeared in the proceedings of LICS’17. 1.2.2018 The first on-the-fly quantum money transaction was implemented by researchers in Paris, including Iordanis Kerenidis. Quantum money is provably unforgeable due to the no-cloning property of quantum information. quantum information Quantum Information is the information stored in a quantum system. A quantum system is composed of one or many qubits: the fundamental unit of quantum information. A qubit is a 2-dimensional vector. The basis encodes two classical values of a bit. Quantum information, i.e. Von Neuman entropy, is the analogous of Shannon entropy for classical information, and it is often used to measure physical properties of a quantum system, like the entanglement. 27.1.2018 The international French and Argentina CNRS laboratory called INFINIS lead by Delia Kesner (IRIF) and Sergio Yovine (CONICET) is presented in the CNRS Rio newsletter. 18.1.2018 IRIF organizes on February, 6th a Scientific Day in memory of Maurice Nivat, professor at Paris Diderot University and a pionneer of theoretical computer science. Please register. 11.1.2018 January the 10th 2018, this is the kick-off meeting of the ANR project FREDDA (FoRmal mEthods for the Design of Distributed Algorithms). 5.1.2018 Lucas Boczkowski and Amos Korman from IRIF, with their co-authors, will present at ITCS 2018 a non-conditional lower bound on information dissemination in stochastic populations. The paper is the first ever to combine an algorithmic lower bound with a biology experiment in collective behavior.