Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 & H2020 Projects

Proofcert

• Title: ProofCert: Broad Spectrum Proof Certificates

• Programm: FP7

• Type: ERC

• Duration: January 2012 - December 2016

• Coordinator: Inria

• Inria contact: Dale Miller

• There is little hope that the world will know secure software if we cannot make greater strides in the practice of formal methods: hardware and software devices with errors are routinely turned against their users. The ProofCert proposal aims at building a foundation that will allow a broad spectrum of formal methods—ranging from automatic model checkers to interactive theorem provers—to work together to establish formal properties of computer systems. This project starts with a wonderful gift to us from decades of work by logicians and proof theorist: their efforts on logic and proof has given us a universally accepted means of communicating proofs between people and computer systems. Logic can be used to state desirable security and correctness properties of software and hardware systems and proofs are uncontroversial evidence that statements are, in fact, true. The current state-of-the-art of formal methods used in academics and industry shows, however, that the notion of logic and proof is severely fractured: there is little or no communication between any two such systems. Thus any efforts on computer system correctness is needlessly repeated many time in the many different systems: sometimes this work is even redone when a given prover is upgraded. In ProofCert, we will build on the bedrock of decades of research into logic and proof theory the notion of proof certificates. Such certificates will allow for a complete reshaping of the way that formal methods are employed. Given the infrastructure and tools envisioned in this proposal, the world of formal methods will become as dynamic and responsive as the world of computer viruses and hackers has become.

Collaborations in European Programs, Except FP7 & H2020

FISP: ANR blanc International

Participants : Kaustuv Chaudhuri, François Lamarche, Sonia Marin, Dale Miller, Lutz Straßburger.

• Title: The Fine Structure of Formal Proof Systems and their Computational Interpretations

• Duration: 01/01/2016 – 31/12/2018

• Partners:

  • University Paris VII, PPS (PI: Michel Parigot)

  • Inria Saclay–IdF, EPI Parsifal (PI: Lutz Straßburger)

  • University of Innsbruck, Computational Logic Group (PI: Georg Moser)

  • Vienna University of Technology, Theory and Logic Group (PI: Matthias Baaz)

• Total funding by the ANR: 316 805 EUR

The FISP project is part of a long-term, ambitious project whose objective is to apply the powerful and promising techniques from structural proof theory to central problems in computer science for which they have not been used before, especially the understanding of the computational content of proofs, the extraction of programs from proofs and the logical control of refined computational operations. So far, the work done in the area of computational interpretations of logical systems is mainly based on the seminal work of Gentzen, who in the mid-thirties introduced the sequent calculus and natural deduction, along with the cut-elimination procedure. But that approach shows its limits when it comes to computational interpretations of classical logic or the modelling of parallel computing. The aim of our project, based on the complementary skills of the teams, is to overcome these limits. For instance, deep inference provides new properties, namely full symmetry and atomicity, which were not available until recently and opened new possibilities at the computing level, in the era of parallel and distributed computing.

COCA HOLA: ANR JCJC Project

Participant : Beniamino Accattoli.

• Title: COst model for Complexity Analyses of Higher-Order programming LAnguages.

• Collaborators: Ugo Dal Lago (University of Bologna & Inria), Delia Kesner (Paris Diderot University), Damiano Mazza (CNRS & Paris 13 University), Claudio Sacerdoti Coen (University of Bologna).

• Duration: 01/10/2016 – 31/09/2019

• Total funding by the ANR: 155 280 EUR

The COCA HOLA project aims at developing complexity analyses of higher-order computations, i.e. that approach to computation where the inputs and outputs of a program are not simply numbers, strings, or compound data-types, but programs themselves. The focus is not on analysing fixed programs, but whole programming languages. The aim is the identification of adequate units of measurement for time and space, i.e. what are called reasonable cost models. The problem is non-trivial because the evaluation of higher-order languages is defined abstractly, via high-level operations, leaving the implementation unspecified. Concretely, the project will analyse different implementation schemes, measuring precisely their computational complexity with respect to the number of high-level operations, and eventually develop more efficient new ones. The goal is to obtain a complexity-aware theory of implementations of higher-order languages with both theoretical and practical downfalls.

The projects stems from recent advances on the theory of time cost models for the lambda-calculus, the computational model behind the higher-order approach, obtained by the principal investigator and his collaborators (who are included in the project).

COCA HOLA will span over three years and is organised around three work packages, essentially:

1. extending the current results to encompass realistic languages;

2. explore the gap between positive and negative results in the literature;

3. use ideas from linear logic to explore space cost models, about which almost nothing is known.