Création du Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles

Le Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles (LMF) est né le 1er janvier 2021 de la volonté politique de ses tutelles - Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, ENS Paris-Saclay, Inria et CentraleSupélec - de créer un pôle ciblé sur les méthodes formelles. Le LMF est formé du Laboratoire Spécification et Vérification (LSV, ENS Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Inria) et de l’équipe Vals du Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique (LRI, Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Inria, CentraleSupélec) soit une centaine de personnes.

Son ambition est d’éclairer le « monde numérique » grâce à la logique mathématique en utilisant les méthodes formelles comme outil d’analyse, de modélisation et de raisonnement pour les programmes informatiques, les protocoles de sécurité, etc. Il s'appuie sur des paradigmes de calcul des plus classiques aux plus novateurs comme l’informatique quantique.

Le LMF est structuré en pôles : son cœur de métier en comporte deux, « Preuves » et « Modèles » ; le troisième, « Interactions », est une ouverture à d’autres domaines tels que l’IA et la biologie.

ACTS 2023 - Workshop on Automata, Concurrency, and Timed Systems

The 6th edition of the Workshop on Automata, Concurrency, and Timed Systems will take place from 30 May to 2 June 2023 at ENS Paris-Saclay.

The workshop series emerged from a long-standing Indo-French cooperation in the areas of ACTS: Automata and Logic, Concurrency Theory, and Timed Systems.

As a special event, this year's programme features a session in honour of Paul Gastin on the occasion of his retirement.

For information on the programme and registration, visit the workshop page.

Alonzo Church Award 2023 for Jacques-Henri Jourdan

Congratulations to Jacques-Henri Jourdan and his co-authors who will receive the 2023 Alonzo Church Award for their outstanding contributions to Logic and computation with the design and implementation of Iris, a higher-order concurrent separation logic framework. The Award will be presented at the 50th EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2023, in July.

Iris has been widely used in academia, and also in industry, e.g., by engineers at Meta to verify the core components of an interprocess communication system for a new operating system.

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Minimal Generating Sets for Semiflows

Speaker: Gerard Memmi LTCI, Telecom-Paris, Institut polytechnique de Paris

Tuesday, 23 Mai 2023, 14:00, Room 1Z56 and Zoom

We discuss important characteristics of finite generating sets for F+, the set of all semiflows with non-negative coordinates of a Petri Net. We endeavor to regroup a number of algebraic results dispersed throughout the Petri Nets literature and also to better position the re- sults while considering semirings such as N or Q+ then fields such as Q. As accurately as possible, we provide a range of new algebraic results on minimal semiflows, minimal supports, and finite minimal generating sets for a given family of semiflows. Minimality of semiflows and of sup- port are critical to develop effective analysis of invariants and behavioral properties of Petri Nets. Main results are concisely presented in a table and our contribution is highlighted. We conclude with the analysis of an example drawn from the telecommunication industry underlining the efficiency brought by using minimal semiflows of minimal supports.

Co-verification for robotics: from simulation to verification

Speaker: Pedro Ribeiro Research Fellow, University of York

Tuesday, 6 June 2023, 14:00, 1Z71

Robots are expected to play important roles in furthering prosperity, however providing formal guarantees on their (safe) behaviour is not yet fully within grasp given the multifaceted nature of such cyber-physical systems. Simulation, favoured by practitioners, provides an avenue for experimenting with different scenarios before committing to expensive tests and proofs. In this talk, I will discuss how models may be brought together for (co-)verification of system properties, with simulation complementing verification. This will be cast using the model-driven RoboStar framework, that clearly identifies models of the software, hardware, and scenario, and has heterogeneous formal semantics amenable to verification using state-of-the-art model-checkers and theorem provers, such as Isabelle/UTP.

Pedro Ribeiro will be visiting the LMF the entire day - interactions welcome.

LICS Test-of-Time Award pour Philippe Schnoebelen

Philippe Schnoebelen

Philippe Schnoebelen reçoit le LICS Test-of-Time Award 2022 pour l'article Temporal Logic with Forgettable Past cosigné avec François Laroussinie (Université Paris-Cité) et Nicolas Markey (IRISA, CNRS). Au moment de la rédaction de l'article en 2002, les trois auteurs étaient membres du même laboratoire LSV qui a intégré le LMF en 2021.

La conférence LICS — Logic in Computer Science est le plus prestigieux forum annuel sur des sujets théoriques et pratiques en informatique liés à la logique au sens large. Le prix LICS Test-of-Time Award récompense un petit nombre d'articles tirés des actes du LICS des 20 dernières années (c'est-à-dire que l'article en question date du LICS 2002 et a été pris en considération cette année) qui ont le mieux résisté à "l'épreuve du temps”. En sélectionnant ces articles, le comité d'attribution tient compte de l'influence qu'ils ont eue depuis leur publication ; en raison de la nature fondamentale des travaux de la LICS, l'impact n'est souvent pas ressenti immédiatement, d'où la perspective de 20 ans.

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Jean-Christophe Filliâtre and Andrei Paskevich win VerifyThis Competition

Jean-​Christophe Filliâtre and Andrei Paskevich have been awarded the prize for the Best Contributed Problem at this year's VerifyThis Competition held as a satelite event of ETAPS 2023.

VerifyThis is a series of program verification competitions, which takes place annually since 2011. The competition offers a number of challenges presented in natural language and pseudocode. Participants have to formalise the requirements, implement a solution, and formally verify the implementation for adherence to the specification.