A Demonic Approach to Information in Probabilistic Systems

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Josée Desharnais, Université Laval (Quebec)
• Friday 12 February 2010, 14:00-15:00
• UG40 Computer Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Paul Levy.

We establish a duality between specifications and infLMPs. An infLMP is a probabilistic process whose transitions satisfy super-additivity instead of additivity. Interestingly, its simple structure can encode a mix of probabilistic and non-deterministic behaviors, and is strongly related to another well-known such model: probabilistic automata.

Our duality puts in relation the category of infLMPs and a category of abstract representations of them based on properties only. We exhibit a Galois connection between these categories and show that we have an adjunct pair of functors when restricted to LMPs only. Our duality also shows that an infLMP can be considered as a demonic representative of a system’s information. Moreover, it carries forward a view where states are less important, and events, or properties, become the main characters, as it should be in probability theory. Along the way, we show that bisimulation and simulation are naturally interpreted in this setting, and we exhibit the interesting relationship between infLMPs and the usual probabilistic modal logics.

This talk is part of the Theoretical computer science seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• Theoretical computer science seminar
• UG40 Computer Science
• computer sience

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.