Basic Research In Computer Science Research Articles

An invaluable vehicle for international collaboration

Collaboration is key to discovery and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is an example of a vehicle that is crucial to the scientific community as it facilitates international collaboration. It is a federal agency that was set up in 1950 and invests in basic research across the spectrum to support discovery and innovation. In the NSFâ–™s Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 Performance and Financial Highlights report Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said that the agency is â–˜the Nationâ–™s preeminent source of federal funding for basic research in computer science, engineering, biology, the social sciences, mathematics, geosciences, the physical sciences, and educationâ–™. NSF has an annual budget of around US$8.3 billion and a broad reach, directly supporting an estimated 313,000 people in 2020. This support assisted researchers, postdoctoral fellows, trainees, teachers and students in bringing their ideas to life and, ultimately, moving closer to real-world impacts with the potential to solve societal challenges. Discovery, learning and research infrastructure are NSFâ–™s key strategic goals and it places emphasis on diverse, interdisciplinary and international collaborations in order to extend its reach as far as possible and invests in research connected to learning, innovation and service to society. Assistant directors head up NSFâ–™s seven sections; each one intended to support research and education in science and engineering. The sections are: biological sciences, computer and information science and engineering, engineering, geosciences, mathematical and physical sciences, social, behavioural and economic sciences, and education and human resources. In 2020, $8.4 billion funding was awarded by NSF to 1,900 colleges, universities and other institutions.

An invaluable vehicle for international collaboration

Collaboration is key to discovery and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is an example of a vehicle that is crucial to the scientific community as it facilitates international collaboration. It is a federal agency that was set up in 1950 and invests in basic research across the spectrum to support discovery and innovation. In the NSF's Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 Performance and Financial Highlights report Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said that the agency is 'the Nation's preeminent source of federal funding for basic research in computer science, engineering, biology, the social sciences, mathematics, geosciences, the physical sciences, and education'. NSF has an annual budget of around US$8.3 billion and a broad reach, directly supporting an estimated 313,000 people in 2020. This support assisted researchers, postdoctoral fellows, trainees, teachers and students in bringing their ideas to life and, ultimately, moving closer to real-world impacts with the potential to solve societal challenges. Discovery, learning and research infrastructure are NSF's key strategic goals and it places emphasis on diverse, interdisciplinary and international collaborations in order to extend its reach as far as possible and invests in research connected to learning, innovation and service to society. Assistant directors head up NSF's seven sections; each one intended to support research and education in science and engineering. The sections are: biological sciences, computer and information science and engineering, engineering, geosciences, mathematical and physical sciences, social, behavioural and economic sciences, and education and human resources. In 2020, $8.4 billion funding was awarded by NSF to 1,900 colleges, universities and other institutions.

Basic research in computer science and software engineering at SKLCS

The State Key Laboratory of Computer Science (SKLCS) is committed to basic research in computer science and software engineering. The research topics of the laboratory include: concurrency theory, theory and algorithms for real-time systems, formal specifications based on context-free grammars, semantics of programming languages, model checking, automated reasoning, logic programming, software testing, software process improvement, middleware technology, parallel algorithms and parallel software, computer graphics and human-computer interaction. This paper describes these topics in some detail and summarizes some results obtained in recent years.

Preface: Volume 39, Issue 1

The EXPRESS workshops aim at bringing together researchers interested in the relations between various formal systems, particularly in the field of Concurrency. More specifically, they focus 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, rewrite systems etc.) on the basis of their relative expressive power.The EXPRESS workshops were originally held as meetings of the HCM project EXPRESS, which was active with the same focus from January 1994 till December 1997. The first three workshops were held respectively in Amsterdam (1994, chaired by Frits Vaandrager), Tarquinia (1995, chaired by Rocco De Nicola), and Dagstuhl (1996, co-chaired by Ursula Goltz and Rocco De Nicola). The workshop in 1997, which took place in Santa Margherita Ligure and was co-chaired by Catuscia Palamidessi and Joachim Parrow, was organized as a conference with a call for papers and a significant attendance from outside the project. The 1998 workshop was held as a satellite workshop of the CONCUR'98 conference in Nice, co-chaired by Ilaria Castellani and Catuscia Palamidessi, and like on that occasion EXPRESS'99 was hosted by the CONCUR'99 conference in Eindhoven, co-chaired by Ilaria Castellani and Björn Victor.This volume contains the Proceedings of EXPRESS'00, which was held in State College (Pennsylvania, USA) on 21 August 2000. It includes the six papers that were selected for presentation by the program committee, together with the contribution by the invited speaker, Neil D. Jones (DIKU, Denmark).We would like to thank the authors of the submitted papers, the invited speakers, and the members of the program committee for their contribution to both the meeting and this volume. Many thanks to Catuscia Palamidessi and Dale Miller (CONCUR 2000 Conference Chairs), and Uwe Nestmann (Satellite Workshops Chair), for the opportunity they gave us to organize EXPRESS'00, and for their continuous support. We would also like to thank Michael Mislove and Uffe Engberg for their help with the editing of the proceedings. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the support of BRICS (Basic Research in Computer Science), Centre of the Danish National Research Foundation.EXPRESS'00 Programme CommitteLuca Aceto(DK)Karen Bernstein Jeffrey(USA)Rance Cleaveland(USA)Wan Fokkink(NL)Rob van Glabbeek(NL)Ursula Goltz(DE)Rosario Pugliese(IT)Julian Rathke(UK)Davide Sangiorgi(FR)Björn Victor(SE)Igor Walukiewicz(PL)Luca Aceto and Björn Victor, Guest Editors

Preface: Volume 52, Issue 1

This volume contains the Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Expressiveness in Concurrency (EXPRESS'01). The Workshop was held in Aalborg, Denmark on August 20, 2001, as satellite event to CONCUR 2001.The EXPRESS workshops aim at bringing together researchers interested in the relations between various formal systems, particularly in the field of Concurrency. More specifically, they focus 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, rewrite systems etc.) on the basis of their relative expressive power.The EXPRESS workshops were originally held as meetings of the HCM project EXPRESS, which was active with the same focus from January 1994 till December 1997. The first three workshops were held respectively in Amsterdam (1994, chaired by Frits Vaandrager), Tarquinia (1995, chaired by Rocco De Nicola), and Dagstuhl (1996, co-chaired by Ursula Goltz and Rocco De Nicola). The workshop in 1997, which took place in Santa Margherita Ligure and was co-chaired by Catuscia Palamidessi and Joachim Parrow, was organized as a conference with a call for papers and a significant attendance from outside the project. The 1998 workshop was held as a satellite workshop of the CONCUR'98 conference in Nice, co-chaired by Ilaria Castellani and Catuscia Palamidessi, and like on that occasion EXPRESS'99 was hosted by the CONCUR'99 conference in Eindhoven, co-chaired by Ilaria Castellani and Björn Victor. The EXPRESS'00 workshop was again held as a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2000, Pennsylvania State University, USA, co-chaired by Luca Aceto and Björn Victor.The papers in this volume were reviewed by the program committee consisting, besides the editors, of Franck van Breugel(Department of Computer Science, York University)Ilaria Castellani(INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis)Rance Cleaveland(Department of Computer Science, SUNY at Stony Brook)Philippa Gardner(Department of Computing, Imperial College)Jan Friso Groote(Department of Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology)Faron Moller(Department of Computer Science, University of Wales Swansea)Joachim Parrow(KTH Teleinformatik, Royal Institute of Technology)Julian Rathke(School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex)Roberto Segala(Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Verona)This volume will be published as volume 52 in the series Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS). This series is published electronically through the facilities of Elsevier Science B.V. and its auspices. The volumes in the ENTCS series can be accessed at the URL http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/entcsWe are very grateful to the following persons, whose help has been crucial for the success of EXPRESS'01: Hans Hüttel and Anna Ingólfsdóttir for their help with the organization of the Workshop as satellite event of CONCUR 2001; Mike Mislove, one of the Managing Editors of the ENTCS series, for his assistance with the use of the ENTCS style files; Uffe Engberg for his great help in the production of the preliminary version of these Proceedings for distribution at the Workshop. Thanks are also due to BRICS (Basic Research in Computer Science), a centre of the Danish National Research Foundation, which has supplied financial support to cover the printing costs.December 20, 2001Luca Aceto and Prakash Panangaden

Preface: Volume 45

ForewordThis volume contains the Proceedings of MFPS 17, the Seventeenth Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics. The conference was hosted by the Basic Research in Computer Science and Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, and took place from May 23 through May 26, 2001.MFPS 17 featured invited talks by seven renowned scholars: •Olivier Danvy Aarhus•Joshua Guttman Mitre Corporation•Neil Jones DIKU•Kim Larsen Aalborg•Prakash Panangaden McGill•Jan Rutten CWI•Glynn Winskel CambridgeThere also were three special sessions: 1.A session honoring Neil Jones (DIKU) organized by Olivier Danvy (Aarhus) and David Schmidt (Kansas State University). The session began with Olivier Danvy's invited address, and included talks by Radhia Cousot (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris), John Hannan (Penn State), John Hughes (Chalmers), David Schmidt and Peter Sestoft (ITU and Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University).2.A session on model checking organized by Gavin Lowe (Oxford). The session began with Kim Parsen's invited address, and included talks by Jose Desharnais (Laval), Michael Huth (Kansas State and Imperial College), Henrik Jensen (BRICS), Marta Kwiatkowska (Birmingham) and Gavin Lowe.3.A session on security organized by Catherine Meadows (NRL). The session began with Joshua Guttman's invited address, and included talks by Andrew Gordon (Microsoft, Cambridge) and Alan Jeffrey (DePaul), Gavin Lowe, Thomas Jensen (INRIA), Dusko Pavlovic (Kestrel), Catherine Meadows and Andre Scedrov (Penn).The remainder of the program was made up of papers selected by the Program Committee from those submitted in response to the Call for Papers that was circulated in Fall, 2000. The Program Committee was co-chaired by Stephen Brookes (CMU) and Michael Mislove (Tulane) and included Lars Birkedal (ITU), Rance Cleaveland (SUNY, Stony Brook), Marcelo Fiore (Cambridge), Matthew Hennessy (Sussex), Alan Jeffrey (DePaul), Achim Jung (Birmingham), Gavin Lowe (Oxford), Catherine Meadows (NRL), Peter O'Hearn (QMW), Suysan Older (Syracuse), Dusko Pavlovic (Kestrel), Uday Reddy (Birmingham), Giuseppe Rosolini (Genoa), Davide Sangiori (INRIA) and Andre Scedrov (Penn). The Organizers of the MFPS series are Stephen Brookes, Michael Main (Colorado), Austin Melton (Kent State), Michael Mislove and David Schmidt. The Local Arrangements for the meeting were overseen by Olivier Danvy and Andrzej Filinski, both of BRICS and Aarhus. We are grateful to these colleagues for having so efficiently overseen the local arrangements. We also are happy to acknowledge the exceptional efforts of Karen Kjer Müller, who literally anticipated almost all of the needs of participants, and saw to it that every aspect of the meeting went off without any problems.Finally, we are extremely grateful for the financial support provided by BRICS and by the US Office of Naval Research, without which the meeting could not have taken place. We are particularly grateful to Dr. Ralph Wachter for his continuing interest in the MFPS series and the support his program in Software Systems has provided the series.Stephen Brookes and Michael Mislove, Guest Editors DedicationThe Organizers of the MFPS series are pleased to dedicate these Proceedings to Neil Jones for his continuing inspiration to the students and researchers in theoretical computer science. Neil has been a regular participant in the MFPS series, dating from his invited address at MFPS III in 1987. MFPS appreciates the continued inspiration that his teaching and research have provided and that his addresses to the MFPS community have so clearly elucidated.

A QUANTITATIVE VERSION OF A THEOREM DUE TO BORWEIN-REICH-SHAFRIR

We give a quantitative analysis of a result due to Borwein, Reich and Shafrir on the asymptotic behaviour of the general Krasnoselski-Mann iteration for nonexpansive self-mappings of convex sets in arbitrary normed spaces. Besides providing explicit bounds we also get new qualitative results concerning the independence of the rate of asymptotic regularity of that iteration from various input data. In the special case of bounded convex sets, where by well-known results of Ishikawa, Edelstein/O'Brien and Goebel/Kirk the norm of the iteration converges to zero, we obtain uniform bounds which do not depend on the starting point of the iteration and the nonexpansive function, but only depend on the error ε, an upper bound on the diameter of C and some very general information on the sequence of scalars λ k used in the iteration. Only in the special situation, where λ k := λ is constant, uniform bounds were known in that bounded case. For the unbounded case, no quantitative information was known before. Our results were obtained in a case study of analysing non-effective proofs in analysis by certain logical methods. General logical meta-theorems of the author guarantee (at least under some additional restrictions) the extractability of such bounds from proofs of a certain kind and provide an algorithm to extract them. Our results in the present paper (which we present here without any reference to that logical background) were found by applying that method to the original proof of the Borwein/Reich/Shafrir theorem. The general logical method which led to these results will be discussed (with further examples) in [22]. *Basic Research in Computer Science, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation.

Intuitionistic Choice and Restricted Classical Logic

Recently, Coquand and Palmgren considered systems of intuitionistic arithmetic in all finite types together with various forms of the axiom of choice and a numerical omniscience schema (NOS) which implies classical logic for arithmetical formulas. Feferman subsequently observed that the proof theoretic strength of such systems can be determined by functional interpretation based on a non-constructive μ-operator and his well-known results on the strength of this operator from the 70’s. In this note we consider a weaker form LNOS (lesser numerical omniscience schema) of NOS which suffices to derive the strong form of binary Konig’s lemma studied by Coquand/Palmgren and gives rise to a new and mathematically strong semi-classical system which, nevertheless, can proof theoretically be reduced to primitive recursive arithmetic PRA. The proof of this fact relies on functional interpretation and a majorization technique developed in a previous paper. ∗Basic Research in Computer Science, Centre of the Danish National Research Foundation.

Semantics, Algorithmics and Logic: Basic Research in Computer Science. BRICS Inaugural Talk

This is a transcript of a talk at the inauguration of BRICS, Basic Research in Computer Science, Centre of the Danish Research Foundation, on 2 February 1994 at the Steno museum, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

(algorithms)

As can be seen from the dual addresses above, while maintaining an association with MIT, I have taken a permanent position with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL). This newly formed laboratory is a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. Its charter is to conduct basic research in computer science---demonstrating entirely new possibilities, rather than making incremental improvements in what is now possible.

Case Study: Openness and Secrecy in Computer Research

The last 15 years have seen an explosive growth in university-based research activities in the fields of computer research and information theory. Technology has both driven and been driven by these activities. Development of the technology for very large-scale integration (VLSI), for example, has driven research on special purpose processors and highly parallel computers which has been translated into actual products that have expanded the technology base and have driven the research further. As a consequence of the push/pull of technology and basic research, many researchers in computer science, computer engineering, and information science find themselves working on basic research problems that may have short-term applications important to the commercial sector and/or important to the national defense. These researchers may face the problem of separating their research into two components: aspects dealing with basic research which should be fully available to their colleagues, and aspects with immediate applications which, for reasons of commercial importance or national defense, should not be made fully available. This problem of separation could lead to problems in the exchange of scientific information by the researchers. External controls on research, either from government or industrial sponsors, could also affect the exchange of scientific information. To study the scientific communication patterns influenced by a sponsor's actual or potential controls, I undertook a case study of three research groups in computer science. The groups were chosen to be illustrative of research in which secrecy could play a restrictive role in scientific communications. The three groups-in cryptology, systems software, and VLSI research-are located at three different U.S. universities, all of which are major research universities with strong research groups in computer science. I interviewed the principals of all three research groups to determine the existence of any controls and the effect of those controls on the conduct of scientific research. Questions were also posed to determine how development work was separated from basic research. Basic research in computer science may be subject to a number of controls, both governmental and industrial. In the United States, governmental controls consist of the Invention Secrecy Act' (which applies to the patenting of militarily useful products), the International Traffic in Arms Regulations2 (which apply to military products), the Export Administration Regulations' (which apply to products and technology that are both militarily useful and useful for the civilian purposes), and the President's 1982 Executive Order 123564 that defines classification for national security purposes. Some research contracts also contain pre-publication review conditions. Industrial controls consist of contractually agreedupon conditions, such as exclusive licenses or pre-publication review, and publication delays to ensure the patentability of products. The latter is also written into many university employment contracts. Conflicts of interest that also affect scientific John C. Cherniavsky is Professor of Computer Science, Computer Science Department, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057. This essay was produced with the support of funds from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities under NSF Grant RII83098 74.

NSF Support of Basic Research in Computer Science

Interestingly enough, much of the computer architecture research currently supported by the National Science Foundation is related to the theme of this issue. Below, John R. Lehmann, program director of NSF's Computer Systems Design Program, has provided a list of principal investigators and the titles of their research, as well as a brief statement on how to submit a research proposal.

National Science Foundation programs in computer science

This panel will discuss the various programs of the National Science Foundation dealing with Computer Science Education and Research. These include programs on basic research in computer science, research in computer science education and various programs designed to increase the quality of science education, especially where computers can plan a significant role in the educational process.