Programme

Thursday 5.7.07
09:00-10:00
Registration - Opening
10:00-11:00
Constantine Tsinakis (Vanderbilt University):
Algebraic Methods in Logic Read the abstract
Algebraic logic studies classes of algebras that are related to logical systems, as well as the process by which a class of algebras becomes the algebraic counterpart (semantics)" of a logical system. A field practitioner usually approaches the solution of a problem in logic by first reformulating it in the language of algebra; then by using algebra to solve the reformulated problem; and lastly by expressing the result into the language of logic. A representative association of the preceding kind is the one between the class of Boolean algebras and classical propositional calculus.
The focus of this talk is substructural logics and their algebraic counterparts. Substructural logics are non-classical logics that are weaker than classical logic, in the sense that they lack one or more of the structural rules of contraction, weakening and exchange in their Genzen-style axiomatization. (It is, however, convenient to think of the classical logic and intuitionistic logic as substructural logics.) These logics encompass a large number of non-classical logics related to computer science (linear logic), linguistics (Lambek Calculus), philosophy (relevant logics), and multi-valued reasoning.
The following are among the objectives of the talk:
Propose a uniform framework for the study of the algebraic counter-parts of substructural propositional logics. These algebras, referred to as residuated lattices, have a recently discovered rich structure theory. (Note: The term "residuated lattice" has been used in the literature to refer to algebras that are integral, commutative and bounded. This class and its subclasses are not sufficiently general to provide semantics for all substructural logics.)
Show how the algebraic theory of residuated lattices can produce powerful tools for the comparative study of substructural logics.
Stress that the bridge algebraic logic builds is beneficial to both algebra and logic, and that an in depth study of residuated lattices is impossible without the use of logical and proof-theoretic techniques. This point is illustrated with a discussion of the close connection between interpolation theorems for a substructural logic and the amalgamation property for its algebraic counterpart.
11:00-11:30
Long Coffee Break
11:30-12:30
Sergei Artemov (City University of New York):
Justification Logic Read the abstract
We describe a formal theory of justification, Justification Logic, based on classical propositional logic augmented by justification assertions t:F that reads "t is a justification for F." Justification Logic assumes certain justification principles originating from both the mathematical theory of proofs and mainstream epistemology. Lecture 1 will be devoted to the Logic of Proofs LP which gives a propositional axiomatization of proof assertions t:F read as "t is a proof of F" and shows that there is a hidden explicit witness (proof) structure behind S4 and other classical modal logics. This may be regarded as a completion of Kolmogorov and Goedel's effort of the early 1930es to explain intuitionistic logic using the classical notion of proof. Lecture 2 will extend this technique to the general purpose Justification Logic, which is a family of logical systems capturing the notion of justification supplied with Fitting's epistemic semantics. We apply Justification Logic for analyzing Plato's celebrated definition of Knowledge as Justified True Belief.
12:30-13:30
Ayse Berkman (Middle East Technical University):
Groups of Finite Morley Rank Read the abstract
I shall make a quick introduction to the subject, give examples and present the Borovik program that shaped around the main conjecture of the area:
Algebraicity Conjecture An infinite simple group of finite Morley rank is isomorphic to an algebraic group over an algebraically closed field.
In the second half of my talk, I shall present some recent results from the study of groups of finite Morley rank with pseudoreflection subgroups:
If G acts on an abelian group V, with an infinite definable connected abelian subgroup R such that V=[V,R] ⊕ CV(R) and R acts transitively on the non-zero elements of [V,R], then R is called a pseudoreflection subgroup of G.
13:30-17:00
Lunch Break
17:00-17.25
Konstantinos Pouliasis and Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou:
Axiomatizing Principia Metaphysica in Isabelle/HOL
17:25-17.50
Michalis A. Papakyriakou, Prodromos E. Gerakios and Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou:
A Mechanized Proof of Type Safety for the Polymorphic ë-Calculus with References
17:50-18.15
Vladimir Sotirov:
Leibniz's "Calculemus!" at Work
18:15-18.40
Svetla Koeva, Tinko Tinchev and Mitko Yanchev:
Decidability of generalized majority logic
18:40-19.00
Coffee Break
19:00-19.25
Walter Dean:
On Moschovakis's theory of algorithmic identity
19:25-19.50
Nikolaos Galatos:
Algebraic and Relational Semantics for Substructural Logics
19:50-20.15
Yiorgos Stavrinos and Anastasia Veneti:
Of kits and molecules
Friday 6.7.07
09:00-10:00
Sergei Artemov (City University of New York):
Justification Logic Read the abstract
We describe a formal theory of justification, Justification Logic, based on classical propositional logic augmented by justification assertions t:F that reads "t is a justification for F." Justification Logic assumes certain justification principles originating from both the mathematical theory of proofs and mainstream epistemology. Lecture 1 will be devoted to the Logic of Proofs LP which gives a propositional axiomatization of proof assertions t:F read as "t is a proof of F" and shows that there is a hidden explicit witness (proof) structure behind S4 and other classical modal logics. This may be regarded as a completion of Kolmogorov and Goedel's effort of the early 1930es to explain intuitionistic logic using the classical notion of proof. Lecture 2 will extend this technique to the general purpose Justification Logic, which is a family of logical systems capturing the notion of justification supplied with Fitting's epistemic semantics. We apply Justification Logic for analyzing Plato's celebrated definition of Knowledge as Justified True Belief.
10:00-11:00
Stuart Barry Cooper (University of Leeds):
The Interactive Structure of Information: Post's Program Revisited Read the abstract
Computability theory concerns information with a causal structure. As such, it provides a schematic analysis of many naturally occurring situations.
Emil Post was the first to focus on the close relationship between information, coded as real numbers, and its algorithmic infrastructure. Having characterized the close connection between the quantifier type of a real and the Turing jump operation, he looked for more subtle ways in which information entails a particular causal context. Specifically, he wanted to find simple relations on reals which produced richness of local computability-theoretic structure. To this extent, he was not just interested in causal structure as an abstraction, but in the way in which this structure emerges in natural contexts. "Post's program" was the genesis of a more far reaching research project.
In this talk we will firstly review the history of Post’s program, and look at two interesting developments of Post’s approach. The first of these developments concerns the extension of the core program, initially restricted to the Turing structure of the computably enumerable sets of natural numbers, to the Ershov hierarchy of sets. The second looks at how new types of information coming from the recent growth of research into randomness, and the revealing of unexpected new computability-theoretic infrastructure. We will conclude by viewing Post's program from a more general perspective. We will look at how algorithmic structure does not just emerge mathematically from information, but how that emergent structure can model the emergence of very basic aspects of the real world.
11:00-11:30
Long Coffee Break
11:30-12:30
Ilijas Farah (York University):
Set Theory and the Calkin Algebra Read the abstract
Calkin algebra is the 'quantized' analogue of the Boolean algebra P(N)/Fin. Analogues of well-known theorems about P(N)/Fin are sometimes well-known open problems about the Calkin algebra. Solving them requires a fresh look at the old proofs. I am going to survey some of the recent results.
12:30-13:30
Thomas Eiter (Vienna University of Technology):
Towards a Semantic Web: Combining Rules and Ontologies Read the abstract
In the last years, there have been increasing efforts to bridge the separated worlds of rule-based formalisms and of logic-based ontology languages for knowledge representation and reasoning.  This is in particular motivated by the vision of an enhanced version of the World Wide Web, in which semantic access to contents is provided for machine-based information processing. While ontologies play here a key role, the most prominent formalisms and standards including the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is based on description logics, are insufficient to accommodate the needs for knowledge representation in practice. Several proposals for combining rule and ontology formalisms have been made so far, which differ in various respects. However no generally agreed upon solution to the problem has been found so far (and may not exist). In this talk, we address some approaches to combine rules and ontologies, and the problems which arise in this task. Special emphasis is given to non-monotonic combinations that are capable of dealing with missing information, which appears to be a necessary feature for advanced reasoning on the Web. The talk will conclude with some issues for future research.
13:30-17:00
Lunch Break
17:00–17:25
Vassilis Kountouriotis, Christos Nomikos and Panos Rondogiannis:
Boolean Grammars and Negation in Logic Programming
17:25-17:50
Anton Zinoviev:
Logical Applications of the Dual Boolean Ring
17:50-18:15
Eleni Kalyvianaki:
Locality and its applications in natural language semantics
18:15-18:40
Pedro Cabalar, David Pearce and Agustin Valverde:
Minimisation of logic programs
18:40:19:00
Coffee Break
19:00-19:25
Alexander Sakharov:
Classicality as a Property of Predicate Symbols
19:25-19:50
Konstantinos Georgatos:
Geodesic Update
19:50-20:15
Anastasios Michael Fotinopoulos and Pavlos Peppas:
Connecting Recovery and Iterated Belief Revision
Saturday 7.7.07
09:00-10:00
Ilijas Farah (York University):
Set Theory and the Calkin Algebra Read the abstract
Calkin algebra is the 'quantized' analogue of the Boolean algebra P(N)/Fin. Analogues of well-known theorems about P(N)/Fin are sometimes well-known open problems about the Calkin algebra. Solving them requires a fresh look at the old proofs. I am going to survey some of the recent results.
10:00-11:00
Anuj Dawar (University of Cambridge):
On Preservation Theorems in Finite Model Theory Read the abstract
Among classical theorems of model theory, preservation theorems are results that relate the syntactic form of formulas to semantic closure properties of the structures they define. The status of preservation theorems in the finite has been an active area of research in finite model theory. More recent work in the area has shifted the focus from the class of all finite structures to classes of structures satisfying natural structural restrictions. In this talk I will examine various recent results relating to preservation under homomorphisms and extensions, both on the class of all finite structures and on more restricted classes.
11:00-11:30
Long Coffee Break
11:30-12:30
Silvio Ghilardi (University of Milano):
Model-theoretic techniques for combined decision procedures in word problems, constraint satisfiability, and model-cheching Read the abstract
In various areas of Logic, Software Verification and Artificial Intelligence, specific formalisms and inference mechanisms are often needed. Such formalisms are able to treat decision problems (modulo a particular theory) for relevant fragments of a logical language or, more generally, to treat satisfiability problems for various kinds of constraints. In order to be concretely useful, such quite specific formalisms must be integrated within each other and within suitable 'general purpose' deductive systems dealing for instance with elementary or higher order logic.  The need of such an integration gives rise to a specific area in Automated Reasoning: the main task in this area is the modular combination of the enormous amount of knowledge, specific procedures and deductive systems already well-known to the scientific community.
In this mini-course on combination of decision procedures, we review (taking a model-theoretic viewpoint)  recent developments concerning decidability transfer results: we recall the basic Nelson-Oppen schema known since 1980, and we see  how it can be  extended  to  non-disjoint signatures and to  quite elaborated logical formalisms.  While keeping model-completeness and quantifier-elimination as the main conceptual tools, we traverse in a uniform way various applications domains, ranging from algebraic equational reasoning, to universal fragments of first-order theories, to modal/description logics, and finally also to model-checking for infinite state systems (where adding a temporal dimension to a first order theory is treated as a special kind of  a combination problem).
12:30-13:30
Michalis Mytilineos: In memoriam
13:30-20:00
Excursion
Sunday 8.7.07
09:00-10:00
Silvio Ghilardi (University of Milano):
Model-theoretic techniques for combined decision procedures in word problems, constraint satisfiability, and model-cheching Read the abstract
In various areas of Logic, Software Verification and Artificial Intelligence, specific formalisms and inference mechanisms are often needed. Such formalisms are able to treat decision problems (modulo a particular theory) for relevant fragments of a logical language or, more generally, to treat satisfiability problems for various kinds of constraints. In order to be concretely useful, such quite specific formalisms must be integrated within each other and within suitable 'general purpose' deductive systems dealing for instance with elementary or higher order logic.  The need of such an integration gives rise to a specific area in Automated Reasoning: the main task in this area is the modular combination of the enormous amount of knowledge, specific procedures and deductive systems already well-known to the scientific community.
In this mini-course on combination of decision procedures, we review (taking a model-theoretic viewpoint)  recent developments concerning decidability transfer results: we recall the basic Nelson-Oppen schema known since 1980, and we see  how it can be  extended  to  non-disjoint signatures and to  quite elaborated logical formalisms.  While keeping model-completeness and quantifier-elimination as the main conceptual tools, we traverse in a uniform way various applications domains, ranging from algebraic equational reasoning, to universal fragments of first-order theories, to modal/description logics, and finally also to model-checking for infinite state systems (where adding a temporal dimension to a first order theory is treated as a special kind of  a combination problem).
10:00-11:00
Ali Enayat (American University):
Automorphisms of Models of Arithmetic Read the abstract
We discuss a recently developed method of constructing automorphisms of models of arithmetic that provides a unified, powerful approach to building desirable automorphisms of models of a variety of arithmetical theories, ranging from bounded arithmetic to second order arithmetic. As we shall explain, this new method can also be used to establish a long standing conjecture of Schmerl by showing that the isomorphism types of fixed point sets of countable arithmetically saturated model M of Peano arithmetic are precisely the isomorphism types of elementary submodels of M.
11:00-11:30
Coffee Break
11:30-11:55
Dimiter Vakarelov:
A recursive generalization of Ackermann Lemma with applications to modal ì-definability
11:55-12:20
Alexandra A. Soskova and Ivan N. Soskov:
Jump spectra of abstract structures
12:20-12:45
Hristo Ganchev and Ivan Soskov:
The groups AUT(Dù') and AUT(De) are isomorphic
12:45-13:10
Georgi Georgiev:
Quantifiers on equivalence relations in local agreement
13:10-13:35
Alla Sirokofskich:
Census Functions in Weak Arithmetic
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