The problem of querying description logic knowledge bases using database-style queries (in particular, conjunctive queries) has been a major focus of recent description logic research. An important issue that arises in this context is how to handle the case in which the data is inconsistent with the ontology. Indeed, since in classical logic an inconsistent logical theory implies every formula, inconsistency-tolerant semantics are needed to obtain meaningful answers. I will first present a practical approach for querying inconsistent DL-Lite knowledge bases using three natural semantics (AR, IAR, and brave) previously proposed in the literature and that rely on the notion of a repair, which is an inclusion-maximal subset of the data consistent with the ontology. Since these three semantics provide answers with different levels of confidence, I will then present a framework for explaining query results, to help the user to understand why a given answer was or was not obtained under one of the three semantics.

We study Nash equilibria in games on graphs with an imperfect monitoring based on a public signal. In such games, deviations and players responsible for those deviations can be hard to detect and track. We propose a generic epistemic game abstraction, which conveniently allows to represent the knowledge of the players about these deviations, and give a characterization of Nash equilibria in terms of winning strategies in the abstraction. We then use the abstraction to develop algorithms for some payoff functions.

Concurrent Kleene algebras (CKA) and bi-Kleene algebras support equational reasoning about computing systems with concurrent behaviours. Their natural semantics is given by series(-parallel) rational pomset languages, a standard true concurrency semantics, which is often associated with processes of Petri nets.

In the first part of the talk, I will present an automaton model designed to describe such languages of pomset, which satisfies a Kleene-like theorem. The main difference with previous constructions is that from expressions to automata, we use Brzozowski derivatives.

In a second part, I will use Petri nets to reduce the problem of containment of languages of pomsets to the equivalence of finite state automata. In doing so, we prove decidabilty as well as provide tight complexity bounds.

I will finish the presentation by briefly presenting a recent proof of completness, showing that two series-rational expressions are equivalent according to the laws of CKA exactly when their pomset semantics are equal.

Joint work with Damien Pous, Georg Struth, Tobias Kappé, Bas Luttik, Alexandra Silva, and Fabio Zanasi

My presentation is about effective characterisations: given a representation of a regular language, decide if the language is “simple” in some specific sense. A classical example of such a characterisation is the result by Schutzenberger, McNaughton, and Papert, saying that it is decidable if a given regular language of finite words can be defined in first-order logic. Over the years, such characterisations were provided for many other natural classes of languages, especially in the case of finite and infinite words. It is often assumed that a “golden standard” for such a characterisation is to provide equations that must be satisfied in a respective algebra representing the language.

The aim of my talk is to survey a number of examples in which it is not possible to provide algebraic representation of the considered languages; but instead characterisations can be obtained by a well-designed game of infinite duration. Using these examples, I will try to argue that game-based approach is the natural replacement for algebraic framework in the cases where algebraic representations are not available.

In this talk I will discuss the following natural question: Given a class of computational models C, does there exist two distinct inputs which give the same output for all the models in the class. I will discuss this question more precisely for weighted automata in general and for max-plus automata in particular. Weighted automata are a quantitative extension of automata which allows to compute values such as costs and probabilities. Max-plus automata are a special case of weighted automata, particularly suitable to model gain optimisation problems. We will see that in this last case, we end up with particularly intricate (and open) questions, related to finding identities in the semiring of tropical matrices.

We present a few results and several open problems concerning complete deterministic finite automata in which every non-empty subset of the state set occurs as the image of the whole state set under the action of a suitable input word. In particular, we give a complete description of such automata with minimal transition monoid size.

The robustness of the famous compression algorithm of Lempel and Ziv is still not well understood: in particular, until now it was unknown whether the addition of one bit in front of a compressible word could make it incompressible. This talk will answer that question, advertised by Jack Lutz under the name “one-bit catastrophe” and which has been around since at least 1998. We will show that a “well” compressible word remains compressible when a bit is added in front of it, but some “few” compressible words indeed become incompressible. This is a joint work with Guillaume Lagarde.

A Markov decision process models the interactions between a controller giving inputs and a stochastic environment. In this well-studied model, transitions are fired instantaneously. We study semi-Markov decision processes, where each transition takes some time to fire, determined by a given probabilistic distribution (for instance, an exponential distribution). The question we investigate is how to compare two semi-Markov decision processes. We introduce and study the algorithmic complexity of two relations, “being faster than”, and “being equally fast as”.

Dans le cadre des journées de clôture du projet MealyM (https://mealym.sciencesconf.org/)

Manuscrit disponible ici : https://www.irif.fr/_media/users/godin/these30-06-17.pdf

Dans le cadre des journées de clôture du projet MealyM (https://mealym.sciencesconf.org/)

Manuscrit disponible ici : https://mealym.sciencesconf.org/data/program/HdR.pdf

A new classification scheme for real numbers will be given, motivated by ideas from statistical mechanics in general and work of Knauf and Fiala and Kleban in particular. Critical for this classification of real numbers will be the Diophantine properties of continued fraction expansions. Underneath this classification is a new partition function on the space of infinite sequences of zeros and ones.

The Orbit Problem consists of determining, given a linear transformation $A$ on $Q^d$, together with vectors $x$ and $y$, whether the orbit of $x$ under repeated applications of $A$ can ever reach $y$.

We will investigate this problem with a different point of view: is it possible to synthesise suitable invariants, that is, subsets of $Q^d$ that contain $x$ but not $y$. Such invariants provide natural certificates for negative instances of the Orbit Problem. We will show that semialgebraic invariants exist in all reasonable cases. A more recent (yet unpublished) result is that existence of semilinear invariants is decidable.

This is a joint work with Nathanaël Fijalkow, Joël Ouaknine, Amaury Pouly and James Worrell, published in STACS 2017.

Formal models for the computation of problems, say circuits, automata, Turing machines, can be naturally extended to compute word-to-word functions. But abstracting from the computation model, what does it mean to “lift” a language class to functions? We propose to address that question in a first step, developing a robust theory that incidentally revolves around the (topological) notion of continuity. In language-theoretic terms, a word-to-word function is V-continuous, for a class of languages V, if it preserves membership in V by inverse image.

In a second step, we focus on transducers, i.e., automata with letter output. We study the problem of deciding whether a given transducer realizes a V-continuous function, for some classical classes V (e.g., aperiodic languages, group languages, piecewise-testable, …).

If time allows, we will also see when there exists a correlation between the transducer structure (i.e., its transition monoid), and its computing a continuous function.

Joint work with Olivier Carton, Andreas Krebs, Michael Ludwig, Charles Paperman.

We are interested in 2-dimensional cellular automata and more precisely in the recognition of langages in small time. The time complexity we consider is called real-time and is rather classic for the study of cellular automata. It consists of the smallest amount of time needed to read the whole imput. It has been shown that this set of langages depend on the neighborhood of the automaton. For example the two most used neighborhoods (Moore and von Neumann ones) are different with respect to this complexity. Our study deals with more generic sets of neighborhoods, round and diamond neighborhoods. We prove that all diamond neighborhoods can recognize the same langages in real time and that the round neighborhoods can recognize stricly less than the diamond ones.

Several notions of computability have been defined before every one agreed that Turing Machines are the good model of computation, a statement raised to the widely accepted Church-Turing Thesis. However, since then, lots of stronger computability notions have been defined and studied, for the sake of math and because it gives us new insight on some already existing fields.

In this talk, we will see two ways to extend usual computability: by defining a more powerful model, or in a more set theoretic fashion. The first method is used to define Infinite Time Turing Machine, a model where Turing Machines are allowed to compute throught infinite time (that is, throught the ordinals instead of the integers). It has a lot of links with admissibility theory. The second method is used to define alpha-recursion, where alpha is any admissible ordinal. It is an abstract and very general definition of computation. Even if it has a very set-theoretic basis, it reflects the idea of computation and contains the notions of Turing Machine and Infinite Time Turing Machines computabilities. It also includes Higher Computability.

By investigating which properties on the extensions are needed to lift theorems to the new setting, we are able to isolate the important properties of the classical case. We also apply these generalized recursion theories to define randomness, in the same way that we did in the classical case: a string is said to be random if it has no exceptionnal properties, in a computable sense. Our new definition of computation then gives use new definition of randomness.

(No prior knowledge on set theory is assumed.)

In this talk I will give a gentle introduction to symbolic dynamics and motivate an open question in this field: which are the structures where can we construct aperiodic tilings using local rules. I will then introduce the notion of simulation of an effective dynamical system and show how these results can be used to produce aperiodic tilings in extremely complicated structures. We end the talk by presenting a novel simulation theorem which allows to show the existence of such tilings in the Grigorchuk group.

We investigate different notions of recognizability for a free monoid morphism $\sigma: A^* \to B^*$. Full recognizability occurs when each (aperiodic) two-sided sequence over $B$ admits at most one tiling with words $\sigma(a)$, $a \in A$. This is stronger than the classical notion of recognizability of a substitution $\sigma$, where the tiling must be compatible with the language of the substitution. We show that if $A$ is a two-letter alphabet, or if the incidence matrix of $\sigma$ has rank $|A|$, or if $\sigma$ is permutative, then $\sigma$ is fully recognizable. Next we investigate the classical notion of recognizability and improve earlier results of Mossé (1992) and Bezuglyi, Kwiatkowski and Medynets (2009), by showing that any substitution is recognizable for aperiodic points in its substitutive shift. Finally we define (eventual) recognizability for sequences of morphisms which define an $S$-adic shift. We prove that a sequence of morphisms on alphabets of bounded size, such that compositions of consecutive morphisms are growing on all letters, is eventually recognizable for aperiodic points. We provide examples of eventually recognizable, but not recognizable, sequences of morphisms, and sequences of morphisms which are not eventually recognizable. As an application, for a recognizable sequence of morphisms, we obtain an almost everywhere bijective correspondence between the $S$-adic shift it generates and the measurable Bratteli-Vershik dynamical system that it defines.

This is joint work with Valérie Berthé, Jörg Thuswaldner and Reem Yassawi.

An automatic presentation (also called an FA-presentation) is a description of a relational structure using regular languages. The concept an FA-presentation arose in computer science, to fulfil a need to extend finite model theory to infinite structures. Informally, an FA-presentation consists of a regular language of abstract representatives for the elements of the structure, such that each relation (of arity $n$, say) can be recognized by a synchronous $n$-tape automaton. An FA-presentation is “unary” if the language of representatives is over a 1-letter alphabet.

In this talk, I will introduce and survey automatic presentations, with particular attention to connections with decidability and logic. I will then discuss work with Nik Ruskuc (Univ. of St Andrews, UK) and Richard Thomas (Univ. of Leicester, UK) on algebraic and combinatorial structures that admit automatic presentations or unary automatic presentations. The main focus will be on results that characterize the structures of some type (for example, groups, trees, or partially ordered sets) that admit automatic presentations.

Il y a 50 ans, Cerny a posé une conjecture combinatoire sur les automates, qui n'est toujours pas résolue. Un automate est dit synchronisé quand il existe un mot u et un état p tel que depuis n'importe quel état, si on lit u on arrive en p. Sa conjecture est que si l'automate synchronisé possède n états, alors il existe un tel u de longueur au plus (n-1)2. Dans cet exposé, nous nous intéresserons à la version probabiliste de la conjecture de Cerny : on montrera qu'un automate aléatoire est non seulement synchronisé (résultat déjà prouvé par Berlinkov), mais qu'en plus la conjecture de Cerny est vraie avec forte probabilité.

On s'intéresse au parallèle entre 2 problèmes sur des modèles distincts d'automates. D'une part, les automates de Mealy (transducteurs lettre à lettre complets) qui produisent des semi-groupes engendrés par les transformations sur les mots infinis associées aux états. En 2013, Gillibert a montré que le problème de la finitude de ces semi-groupes était indécidable, en revanche la question est ouverte dans le cas où l'automate de Mealy produit un groupe. D'autre part, les automates cellulaires unidirectionnels pour lesquels la question de la décidabilité de la périodicité est ouverte. On peut montrer l'équivalence de ces problèmes. On fera un pas vers une preuve d'indécidabilité en montrant qu'il est possible de simuler du calcul Turing dans un automate cellulaire unidirectionnel réversible, rendant ainsi des problèmes de prédiction indécidables ainsi que la question de la périodicité partant d'une configuration donnée finie.

I will present the equivalence between a class of asynchronous distributed automata and a small fragment of least fixpoint logic, when restricted to finite directed graphs. More specifically, the considered logic is (a variant of) the fragment of the modal μ-calculus that allows least fixpoints but forbids greatest fixpoints. The corresponding automaton model uses a network of identical finite-state machines that communicate in an asynchronous manner and whose state diagram must be acyclic except for self-loops. As a by-product, the connection with logic also entails that the expressive power of those machines is independent of whether or not messages can be lost.

Given an integer base $b>1$, a set of integers is represented in base $b$ by a language over $\{0,1,\dots,b-1\}$. The set is said $b$-recognisable if its representation is a regular language. It is known that eventually periodic sets are $b$-recognisable in every base $b$, and Cobham's theorem imply the converse: no other set is $b$-recognisable in every base $b$.

We are interested in deciding whether a $b$-recognisable set of integers (given as a finite automaton) is eventually periodic. Honkala showed in 1986 that this problem is decidable and recent developments give efficient decision algorithms. However, they only work when the integers are written with the least significant digit first.

In this work, we consider here the natural order of digits (Most Significant Digit First) and give a quasi-linear algorithm to solve the problem in this case.

No knowledge in arithmetic complexity will be assumed.

We still don't know an explicit polynomial that requires non-commutative circuits of size at least superpolynomial. However, the context of non commutativity seems to be convenient to get such lower bound because the rigidity of the non-commutativity implies a lot of constraints about the ways to compute. It is in this context that Nisan, in 1991, provides an exponential lower bound against the non commutative Algebraic Branching Programs computing the permanent, the very first one in arithmetic complexity. We show that this result can be naturally seen as a particular case of a theorem about circuits with unique parse tree, and show some extensions to get closer to lower bounds for general NC circuits.

Two joint works: with Guillaume Malod and Sylvain Perifel; with Nutan Limaye and Srikanth Srinivasan.

In the first part of the talk I will recall the duality approach to language recognition. To start with, I will explain the following simple fact. The elements of the syntactic monoid of a regular language $L$ over a finite alphabet $A$ are in one to one correspondence with the atoms of the finite sub-Boolean algebra of $P(A^*)$ generated by the quotients of $L$. This correspondence can be seen as an instance of Stone duality for Boolean algebras, and has lead to a topological notion of recognition for non-regular languages, the so called Boolean spaces with internal monoids.

A fundamental tool in studying the connection between algebraic recognisers, say classes of monoids, and fragments of logics on words is the availability of constructions on monoids which mirror the action of quantifiers, such as block products or other kinds of semidirect products. In the second part of the talk I will discuss generalisations of these techniques beyond the case of regular languages and present a general recipe for obtaining constructions on the topological recognisers introduced above that correspond to operations on languages possibly specified by transducers.

This talk is based on joint work with Mai Gehrke and Luca Reggio.

A subset of natural numbers is called an IP-set if it contains an infinite increasing sequence of numbers and all its finite sums. In the talk we show how certain families of uniformly recurrent words can be used to generate IP-sets, as well as sets possessing some related additive properties.

Schema mappings are a fundamental concept in data integration and exchange, and they have been thoroughly studied in different data models. For graph data, however, mappings have been studied in a very restricted context that, unlike real-life graph databases, completely disregards the data they store. Our main goal is to understand query answering under graph schema mappings - in particular, in exchange and integration of graph data - for graph databases that mix graph structure with data. We show that adding data querying alters the picture in a very significant way.

As the model, we use data graphs: a theoretical abstraction of property graphs employed by graph database implementations. We start by showing a very strong negative result: using the simplest form of nontrivial navigation in mappings makes answering even simple queries that mix navigation and data undecidable. This result suggests that for the purposes of integration and exchange, schema mappings ought to exclude recursively defined navigation over target data. For such mappings and analogs of regular path queries that take data into account, query answering becomes decidable, although intractable. To restore tractability without imposing further restrictions on queries, we propose a new approach based on the use of null values that resemble usual nulls of relational DBMSs, as opposed to marked nulls one typically uses in integration and exchange tasks. If one moves away from path queries and considers more complex patterns, query answering becomes undecidable again, even for the simplest possible mappings.

I will discuss a notion of equivalence between two probabilistic systems introduced by Larsen and Skou in 89 called probabilistic bisimulation.

In particular, I will look at logical characterizations for this notion: the goal is to describe a logic such that two systems are bisimilar if and only if they satisfy the same formulas. This question goes all the way back to Hennessey and Millner for non probabilistic transition systems.

I will develop topological tools and give very general logical characterization results for probabilistic simulation and bisimulation.

Let $(X,T)$ be a one-dimensional invertible subshift. The symmetry group of $(X,T)$ is the group of all shift-commuting homeomorphisms $X$. In the larger reversing symmetry group of $(X,T)$, we also consider homeomorphisms $\Phi$ of $X$ where $\Phi \circ T= T^{-1}\circ \Phi$, also called lip conjugacies. We define a generalisation of the reversing symmetry group for higher dimensional shifts, and we find this extended symmetry group for two prototypical higher dimensional shifts, namely the chair substitution shift and the Ledrappier shift. Joint work with M. Baake and J.A.G Roberts.
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French version: Les automorphismes généralisés des sous shifts.
Soit $(X,\mathbb Z^d)$ un soushift inversible. Nous définissons le groupe des automorphismes généralisés: c'est le normalisateur du groupe engendré par le shift dans le groupe d'homéomorphismes de $X$. Nous trouvons les automorphismes généralisés de deux shifts prototyiques: le pavage de la chaise et le soushift Ledrappier. En collaboration avec M. Baake et J.A.G Roberts.

The evaluation of queries is a central problem in database management systems. Given a query q and a database D the evaluation of q over D consists in computing the set q(D) of all answers to q on D. An interesting case is when the query is boolean (aka the model checking problem, where the answer to the query is either a “yes” or a “no”). Even for boolean query, the problem of computing the answer (with input q and D) is already PSpace-complete. For non-boolean queries, the size of the output can blow up to |D|^r, where r is the arity of q. It is therefore not always realistic to compute the entire set of solutions. Moreover, the time needed to construct the set might not reflect the difficulty of the task.

In this talk we will discuss query enumeration, that is outputting the solutions one by one. Two parameters enter in play, the delay and the preprocessing time. The delay is the maximal time between two consecutive output and the preprocessing time is the time needed to produce the first solution. We will investigate cases where the delay is constant (does not depend on the size of the database) and the preprocessing is linear (in the size of the database) i.e. constant delay enumeration after linear preprocessing. This is not always possible as this implies a linear model-checking. We will therefore add restriction to the classes of databases and/or queries such as bounded degree databases, tree-like structures, conjunctive queries…