Term modal logic by Anantha Padmanabha

Location: CSA Seminar Hall (Room No. 254, First Floor)

Department of Computer Science and Automation
Department Seminar

Speaker : Anantha Padmanabha

Title : Term modal logic

Date : Thursday, September 19, 2019

Time : 12:00 PM

Venue : CSA Seminar Hall (Room No. 254, First Floor)

Abstract

Modal logic has been ubiquitously used in many fields of computer science including verification, epistemic logic etc. Typically we have two modal operators “Box” and “Diamond” which in a broad sense refers to “necessity” and “possibility” respectively. For instance, (Box_i alpha) in an epistemic setting means that “Reasoner i knows that alpha”. Similarly, (Diamond_i alpha) in the context of a system of processes is interpreted as “Process i can possibly change the system configuration to a state where alpha holds”. These reasoners or process index are referred to as agents in general.
Classically, the number of agents is assumed to be fixed and finite. But in many settings like multi-process systems / client-server systems, we cannot fix the agent set beforehand. The active agents change not only from one model to the other but also from one state to the other in the same model. For instance, in multi-process systems, when the system configuration changes, some processes may be terminated and some new ones may be created.

Term modal logic introduced by Fitting et.al is suitable to study such settings, where we can state properties like “exists x Box_x alpha” which means “there exists some process x such that any state update by process x necessarily leads to a state where alpha holds”.  In this talk we will look at term modal logic in some detail. This is a joint work with R. Ramanujam

Biography of the speaker

Anantha Padmanabha has recently submitted his PhD thesis in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

Host Faculty : Deepak D’Souza

ALL ARE WELCOME