Abishek De : Distributed Control Problem for Free Choice Systems

The distributed synthesis problem is about constructing correct distributed systems, i.e., systems that satisfy a given specification. We consider a slightly more general problem of distributed control, where the goal is to restrict the behavior of a given distributed system in order to satisfy the specification. Our systems are finite state machines that communicate via rendezvous (asynchronous automata). There are a few classes of systems for which the problem has been shown decidable. We solve it for free choice systems, systems whose entire behaviour can be expressed in a (possibly infinite) tree.

Simon Mauras : Social choice theory, and a small survey about rank aggregation

How should we vote? This question has been adressed by philosophers and mathematicians since the XVIIIth century, but no satisfactory solution exists. The talk will start with classical results on social choice theory and move on to the aggregation of rankings seen as an optimization problem. We will discuss NP-Hardness, Hardness of approximation and Approximation algorithms for several variants of this problem.