Satellite Events

3rd workshop on Computational Models for Cell Processes (CompMod 2011)

Systems Biology has been recognized as an exciting new application area for computer science. This satellite event to CONCUR 2011 aims to bring together researchers in concurrency theory, quantitative modeling and related fields interested in the opportunities and challenges of systems biology. We welcome both theoretical and applied contributions related to the relevance and potential of computational modeling in the life sciences. Of special interest are contributions that present cell processes requiring specific syntactic mechanisms, tools that target life science applications, as well as ex- tensions of formal approaches tailored towards their applicability in systems biology. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Qualitative and quantitative modeling and verification
  • Theoretical comparison of formalisms for biological processes
  • Bio-inspired extensions to formal approaches and logical methods
  • Differential, discrete and/or stochastic modeling languages
  • Decomposition and modularization of networks and pathways
  • Applications of computational modeling and simulation

Many fundamental concepts from concurrency theory are fruitfully employed in the modeling of biological processes, cell interactions and in medical case studies, in particular process algebras, Petri nets, Markov chains, timed and hybrid automata. Apart from being an interesting area of application and inspiration for many researchers in concurrency theory, also from the perspective of quantitative modeling and analysis, in particular stochastically, systems biology and computational modeling in the life sciences provide an appealing field of investigation.

Website: combio.abo.fi/compmod11/
Chairs: Ion Petre and Erik de Vink

18th International Workshop on Expressiveness in Concurrency (EXPRESS 2011)

The EXPRESS workshops aim at bringing together researchers interested in the relations between various formal systems, particularly in the field of Concurrency. Their focus has traditionally been on the comparison between programming concepts (such as concurrent, functional, imperative, logic and object-oriented programming) and between mathematical models of computation (such as process algebras, Petri nets, event structures, modal logics, and rewrite systems) on the basis of their relative expressive power. The EXPRESS workshop series has run successfully since 1994 and over the years this focus has become broadly construed. Since EXPRESS'09 we have made this development "official": we are now aiming to bring together researchers who are interested in the expressiveness and comparison of formal models that broadly relate to concurrency. In particular, this includes emergent fields such as logic and interaction, game-theoretic models, and service-oriented computing.

Website: www.lix.polytechnique.fr/comete/EXPRESS11/
Chairs: Bas Luttik and Frank Valencia

10th International Workshop on Foundations of Coordination Languages and Software Architectures (FOCLASA 2011)

Computation nowadays is becoming inherently concurrent, either because of characteristics of the hardware (with multicore processors becoming omnipresent) or due to the ubiquitous presence of distributed systems (incarnated in the Internet). Computational systems are therefore typically distributed, concurrent, mobile, and often involve composition of heterogeneous components.

To specify and reason about such systems and go beyond the functional correctness proofs, e.g., by supporting reusability and improving maintainability, approaches such as coordination languages and software architecture are recognised as fundamental.

The goal of the FOCLASA workshop is to put together researchers and practitioners of the aforementioned fields, to share and identify common problems, and to devise general solutions in the context of coordination languages and software architectures.

Website: foclasa.lcc.uma.es
Chairs: Antonio Ravara, MohammadReza Mousavi

GASICS Workshop on Games for Design, Verification and Synthesis (GASICS 2011)

The GASICS project studies game theoretic formalizations of interactive complex computational systems and algorithms for their analysis and synthesis. Our goal is to overcome the limitations of the existing notions of games played on graphs introduced by computer scientists, most of them being of the kind "two-player zero-sum". We aim to extend them to "multiple-player nonzero-sum" games, and show the applicability of the new theory to the analysis and synthesis of interactive computational systems.

Website: www.lsv.ens-cachan.fr/Events/gasics11//
Chairs: Kim G. Larsen, Nicolas Markey, Jean-François Raskin and Wolfgang Thomas

4th International “Logics, Agents, and Mobility” Workshop (LAM 2011)

The aim of this series of workshops is to bring together active researchers in the areas of logics and other formal frameworks on the one hand, and mobile systems on the other hand. The main focus is on the field of logics and calculi for mobile agents, and multi-agent systems. Many notions used in the theory of agents are derived from philosophy, logic, and linguistics (belief, desire, intention, speech act, etc.), and interdisciplinary discourse has proved fruitful for the advance of this domain. Outside of academia, the deployment of large-scale pervasive infrastructures (mobile ad-hoc networks, mobile devices, RFIDs, etc.) is becoming a reality. This raises a number of scientific and technological challenges for the software modelling and programming models for such large-scale, open and highly-dynamic distributed systems. The agent and multi-agent systems approach seems particularly adapted to tackle this challenge, but there are many issues remaining to be investigated. For instance, the agents must be location-aware since the actual services available to them may depend on their (physical or virtual) location. The quality and quantity of resources at their disposal is also largely fluctuant, and the agents must be able to adapt to such highly dynamic environments. Moreover, mobility itself raises a large number of difficult issues related to safety and security, which require the ability to reason about the software (e.g. for analysis or verification). Logics and type systems with temporal or other kinds of modalities (relating to location, resource and/or security-awareness) play a central role in the semantic characterisation and then verification of properties about mobile agent systems. There are still many open problems and research questions in the theory of such systems. The workshop is intended to showcase results and current work being undertaken in these areas with a focus on logics for specification and verification of dynamic, mobile systems. The topics of interest lie in the area of logics for concurrent systems with a focus on the special application domain of mobile systems and (multi-)agent-based systems. Therefore, papers lie in the intersection of the principal topic of the CONCUR conference, namely:

  • Basic models of concurrency
  • Logics for concurrency – here additionally: mobility
  • Models of specialized systems - here mobile systems
  • Verification and analysis techniques – here especially: type systems
  • Related programming models

Website: web.me.com/farwer/LAM11/LAM11.html
Chairs: Berndt Müller and Michael Köhler-Bußmeier

Models and Logics for Quantitative Analysis (MLQA 2011)

Continuous modeling and analysis techniques is currently quite a hot topic in the area of models and logics for quantitative analysis. Continuous domains are systematically and naturally used in the area of quantitative Process Algebras and Logics e.g. in the form of Time, or Probability, or random variable parameters (e.g. rates of exponential distributions). More recently, continuous domains have been used as approximations of typically discrete quantities which arise naturally when reasoning about (quantitative, e.g. stochastic) process algebras, like population sizes, i.e. the number of processes in a certain state at a certain point in time. Examples of such a use of continuous domains are PEPA ODE semantics, BioPEPA and can be found in the area of fluid/flow or mean-field analysis. In all these cases, discrete measures which vary over time are approximated by continuous functions (of time) which are often characterized as solutions of a set of differential equations. The aim of the MLQA workshop is to bring together experts in areas like process algebra, stochastic differential equations, fluid-flow techniques for process algebras, for queueing networks or Petri nets, stochastic hybrid systems, both from the theoretical foundations point of view and from that of the applications. The relevance to CONCUR and QEST is twofold: concurrent and distributed systems modeling scalability requirements can be addressed using approximation techniques as those considered in the proposed workshop; moreover, a language first approach, typically used in non standard, e.g. ODE based, semantics for quantitative process algebras fits well in the tradition of CONCUR and QEST.

Website: http://wiki.ercim.eu/wg/MLQA/index.php/MLQA_2011/
Chair: Jane Hillston, Diego Latella and Flemming Nielson

Security Issues in Concurrency (SecCo 2011)

Emerging trends in concurrency theory require the definition of models and languages adequate for the design and management of new classes of applications, mainly to program either WANs (like Internet) or smaller networks of mobile and portable devices (which support applications based on a dynamically reconfigurable communication structure). Owing to the openness of these systems, new critical aspects come into play, such as the need to deal with malicious components or with a hostile environment. Current research on network security issues (e.g. secrecy, authentication, etc.) usually focuses on opening cryptographic point-to-point tunnels. Therefore, the proposed solutions in this area are cannot always be used to support the end-to-end secure interaction between entities whose availability or location is not known beforehand.

The aim of the workshop is to cover the gap between the security and the concurrency communities. More precisely, the workshop promotes the exchange of ideas, trying to focus on common interests and stimulating discussions on central research questions. In particular, we look for papers dealing with security issues (such as authentication, integrity, privacy, confidentiality, access control, denial of service, service availability, safety aspects, fault tolerance) in emerging fields like web services, mobile ad-hoc networks, agent-based infrastructures, peer-to-peer systems, context-aware computing, global/ubiquitous/pervasive computing.

Website: www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~kostas/SecCo2011/
Chairs: Kostas Chatzikokolakis and Jun Pang

Structural Operational Semantics (SOS 2011)

Structural operational semantics (SOS) provides a framework for giving operational semantics to programming and specification languages. A growing number of programming languages from commercial and academic spheres have been given usable semantic descriptions by means of structural operational semantics. Because of its intuitive appeal and flexibility, structural operational semantics has found considerable application in the study of the semantics of concurrent processes. It is also a viable alternative to denotational semantics in the static analysis of programs, and in proving compiler correctness. Moreover, it has found application in emerging areas of computing such as probabilistic systems and systems biology. Structural operational semantics has been successfully applied as a formal tool to establish results that hold for classes of process description languages. This has allowed for the generalization of well-known results in the field of process algebra, and for the development of a meta-theory for process calculi based on the realization that many of the results in this field only depend upon general semantic properties of language constructs.

This workshop aims at being a forum for researchers, students and practitioners interested in new developments, and directions for future investigation, in the field of structural operational semantics. One of the specific goals of the series of SOS workshops is to establish synergies between the concurrency and programming language communities working on the theory and practice of SOS.

Website: sos2011.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Chairs: Michel Reniers and Pawel Sobocinski

Young Researchers Workshop on Concurrency Theory (YR-CONCUR 2011)

This workshop aims at providing a platform for PhD students and young researchers who recently completed their doctoral studies, to exchange new results related to concurrency theory and receive feedback on their research. Focus is on informal discussions. Excellent master students are also encouraged to contribute.

Website: web.me.com/bollig/YR-CONCUR_2011/home.html
Chair: Benedikt Bollig

 

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