9 March 2007
First ANNOUNCEMENT
Nederlandse Vereniging voor Theoretische Informatica
****************************************************
NVTI Theory Day 2007
Friday March 9, 2007, starting at 9:30
Hoog Brabant, Utrecht (close to Central Station)
Lecturers:
Tom Ball (Microsoft)
Nitin Saxena (CWI)
Rineke Verbrugge (RUG)
Gerhard Woeginger (TU/e)
We are happy to invite you for the Theory Day 2007 of the NVTI. The
Dutch Asssociation for Theoretical Computer Science (NVTI) supports
the study of theoretical computer science and its applications.
Again, we managed to compose an interesting program with excellent
speakers from the Netherlands and abroad, covering important streams
in theoretical computer science. Below you will find the abstracts.
The full programme will follow later.
Kind regards,
Jaco van de Pol,
NVTI secretary.
====================================================================
Speaker : Tom Ball (Microsoft)
Title : On the Design and Implementation of Static Analysis Tools
Abstract:
At Microsoft, we now regularly apply a new generation of static
analysis tools that can automatically identify serious defects in
programs. These tools examine millions of lines of code every day,
long before the software is released for general use. With these
tools, we catch more defects earlier in the software process, enabling
Microsoft to deliver more reliable systems. A number of these tools
have been released for general use through Microsoft's Visual Studio
integrated development environment as well as freely available
development kits.
In this talk I will address the question: "How does one design and
implement a static analysis tool chain to help people effectively
address a software reliability problem?" In particular, I will
identify a set of basic techniques that have proven very useful in
constructing static analysis tools and have shown their worth through
numerous applications. Experience with these techniques suggests we
are approaching an exciting time when more people can contribute to
the design and implementation of static analysis tools.
====================================================================
Speaker : Nitin Saxena (CWI)
Title : tba (Goedel prize winner for 'Primes is in P')
Abstract:
====================================================================
Speaker : Rineke Verbrugge (RUG)
Title : Reasoning about others in multi-agent systems
Abstract:
Everyone reasons about others almost daily - when leading a team,
negotiating a raise, deciding whether to send email to a group of
colleagues with the `cc' or the `bcc' option, or deciding how to
formulate feedback tactfully. Social cognition and cooperation are
essential to success in human life and increasingly essential to
modern computer science.
Multi-agent systems consist of dynamically cooperating computational
systems, engineered to solve complex problems that require expertise
and capabilities beyond the individual components. Investigations into
cooperative interactions in the behavioral sciences and computer
science show a marked convergence: after all, people cooperate,
machines cooperate, and mixed teams consisting of software agents,
robots and people cooperate, sometimes even better than people and
machines separately.
The area of multi-agent systems has started in the early nineties from
distributed artificial intelligence. In recent years fields like
social psychology, game theory, logic, and argumentation theory have
also contributed substantially to multi-agent systems in order to
understand cooperation and to design effective computational and mixed
human-machine multi-agent systems.
Understanding social interactions requires rich formal models of
cooperation and social cognition, because multi-agent systems consist
of several agents that can act and communicate autonomously, without
central control. This talk will present some recent results about
cooperation and social cognition in multi-agent systems, as seen from
the logical point of view.
====================================================================
Speaker : GJ Woeginger, TU/e
Title : Division of a shared resource
Abstract:
The talk discusses various notions of "fairness" when n processes
have to share a common resource.
We describe and analyze some simple protocols, and compare their
various advantages and disadvantages. The quality of a protocol is
usually measured in the worst-case number of queries that the protocol
issues to the processes. We present some lower bound results on the
number of these queries, and we discuss the trade-off between keeping
this number small and reaching decent approximate fairness.
====================================================================