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2006-07-18

Logic, Language, Information and Computation

The WoLLIC 2006 workshop started today.  This is not the week for me to be away, although I find the program to be challenging and of interest

Two of the WoLLIC tutorials and associated presentations span my interests, with a few other presentations fitting in the middle somewhere.

  • Solomon Feferman’s development of an Operational Theory of Sets intrigues me because I don’t understand it.  I also don’t understand Feferman’s chapter D.4 in the Handbook of Mathematical Logic.  The definition of Cartesian closed universes with a function space that includes basic combinators suggests to me that this should have some bearing on computation but I haven’t puzzled it out.  I thought maybe listening to Feferman would perhaps get me through whatever barrier (i.e., my own ignorance and, oh yes, laziness) that I must traverse in order to be able to make use of this work.   A number of Feferman’s papers are available on-line.  The opportunity is to add some accessible-to-me selection to my summer reading.
      
  • Yuri Gurevich’s thesis about Expanding Notions of Algorithms is relevant to our understanding of the Church-Turing Thesis and limits of computation as effective procedures.  Gurevich suggests that considering algorithms over higher abstractions may take us out of the tar pit.  Others have also suggested that interactive systems may take us beyond Church-Turing.  I don’t know enough to understand in what way there is a break-out, and would love to hear more. I’ve only seen glancing references to the work on AsmL at Microsoft.  Gurevich has an extensive annotated list of articles.  He provides an useful abstract and reading list for WoLLIC.  This is definitely the basis for further summer reading.

These were the main attractors for me.  Other workshop topics provided tangential interest, but learning more might lead to recalibration about those subjects.   This was not enough to justify the trip, especially in the face of competing events here at home.

It’s heartening to know that there is extensive publicly-available material around the themes of both Solomon Feferman and Yuri Gurevich.


The Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) has, in the past, held summer workshops on Logic, Language, and Computation.  I attended LLC 10 on Memorial Weekend of 2001 and had a great time.  Later, the LLCs were replaced by the North American Summer School on Logic, Language and Information (NASSLLI), I suppose to match the European Summer School held on similar themes (and there’s still time to get to ESSLLI 2006).  NASSLLIs moved around the country and were longer than the LLCs.  NASSLLI seems to have disappeared.

 
Comments:
 
orcmid, interesting stuff, indeed.

Do you know if the workshop papers or presentations will be openly available? I'm wondering if these communities of CS are providing open access to their research products. I'm hoping they are.
 
 
My experience is that these workshops are just that and the handouts are not equivalent to journal articles or even, say, something in the SIGACT newsletter. Now, I only have one datapoint to go by, and some workshops do produce proceedings and even books.

I find that it is useful to search on the names of participants and see who has online material or links to online sources. I confirmed that for Solomon Feferman and Yuri Gurevich, but I haven't checked on the others.

I'm doing something similar for the upcoming lang.NET 2006 symposium that I'll be attending at the end of the month.

My general experience is that, especially for academics, there is a significant amount of self-archiving going on via web sites and faculty pages.

I find course and lecture materials that are often helpful too (e.g., while I work through Barwise and Etchemendy's Language, Proof and Logic computer-aided course materials).
 
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