Constructing fully-abstract models of effectful λ-calculi

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

• Philip Saville, University of Oxford
• Friday 03 December 2021, 14:00-15:00
• LG23, SoCS and Zoom (see abstract for link).

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

Adequacy and full abstraction are akin to soundness and completeness in logic: a semantic model is adequate and fully abstract if semantic equality in the model completely characterises contextual equivalence. Typically one can establish adequacy by a logical relations argument, but full abstraction proves to be much more difficult: even basic set-theoretic models of simple languages fail to be fully abstract.

In this talk I will outline a construction which takes a categorical model of Moggi’s computational lambda calculus with primitives and sum types and, subject to certain conditions on the base category, returns an adequate and fully abstract model. Along the way I will sketch the intuition, motivate the main steps in the construction, and indicate the mathematical technologies that make the construction work.

Joint work with Ohad Kammar and Shin-ya Katsumata

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
• LG23, SoCS and Zoom (see abstract for link)
• Theoretical computer science seminar
• computer sience

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.