(sigemb-info 331) Talk by Ana Sokolova, 16.00h this Wednesday

["Ichiro Hasuo" <ichiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear colleagues,

Let me advertise a talk by our guest Ana Sokolova at
RIMS, Kyoto University. It is about foundation of probabilistic
systems (used extensively in system verification) by means
of categorical methods. No registration needed.

See you there!

Best regards,
Ichiro Hasuo
http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~cs

=====
Speaker: Ana Sokolova (Univ. Salzburg)
  http://cs.uni-salzburg.at/~anas/
- Hide quoted text -
Title: Classification of Probabilistic Systems
Time: 16.00 - 17.00, Wednesday 19 Nov 2008
Place: Room 202, RIMS, Kyoto University

Abstract:
Probabilistic models for verification of systems with quantitative
behaviour have been extensively studied in the area of formal methods
in the last couple of decades. Still, there has not been a clear
classification of the various models in a single framework for a long
time. In this work I will report on an expressiveness hierarchy of
probabilistic models which is carried out in the unifying theory of
coalgebras.
Most of the existing (discrete) probabilistic (automata based) models
can be modelled as coalgebras in the category Sets. A simple though
elegant generic observation on the colagebraic level allows us to
compare the expressiveness of the different probabilistic models.
Having presented the classification of discrete probabilistic models,
we will shed some light on a non-discrete model, that has also been
studied in the literature. We will see this model as colagebras in
Meas (the category of measure spaces) and show that it is at least as
expressive as the corresponding discrete model, using the same
expressiveness criterion as before. As future work, using this
observation we would like to build a new-dimension level in the
hierarchy of probabilistic models.