CALCO Report, Part 3

This is the third, and final, installment of the coverage of CALCO 2007 on this blog. Thanks again to Mohammad for providing reports on the first three days of the event.

The first talk on Thursday was an invited address by Barbara König. Barbara's talk gave an excellent introduction to the general ideas and results on an active area of research in concurrency theory, namely the problem of deriving labelled transition system semantics and bisimulation congruences from reduction semantics and rewrite rules. This is a line of research that has been motivated by the theory of bisimulation congruences for process calculi, most notably the pi-calculus, and where categorical techniques play a fundamental role. See, for instance, the work by Leifer and Milner, and that by Sassone and Sobocinski.

Thursday also featured some talks on modal and epistemic logics, two talks on Chu spaces, and several categorical talks, which were alas well beyond my understanding of category theory.

The invited talk on Friday was delivered by Luis Caires, one of the prime movers behind the development of spatial logics. Luis' talk introduced a logical approach to the semantics of types for concurrency and to their soundness proofs based on spatial logics. I found the ideas presented in Luis' talk very intriguing, and I am going to read his paper in the proceedings when I have some time on my hands.

The conference concluded with a session on process algebra, where both Mohammad and I gave talks. (It is not for me to comment on how successful we were :-)) In case anybody is interested, the slides for my talk are here.

I enjoyed my trip to lovely Bergen, and thank the organizers for a very well-organized event. I hope to be able to visit Bergen again in the future. You can see some photos from Bergen here. Eventually, photos from CALCO will be available here.

Let me conclude with a couple of quotes from talks given at the conference and a poem I saw engraved in Vaagsallmenningen in Bergen.

"If you spell out this definition set theoretically, it looks quite horrible, but is not so difficult." (Clemens Kupke)

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." (Marcel Proust, cited by Radu Mardare)

"Hele sit liv,
Anicet,
skal et menneske
laere at leve.
Hele sit liv,
Anicet,
skal han og
laere at doe."

(This roughly means "All his life, Anicet, a man must learn how to live. All his life, Anicet, he must also learn how to die.")