Speaker

Renato Neves

Short bio

Renato Neves is an assistant professor at University of Minho. One of his main foci is the development of reasoning tools, syntax, and semantics for cyber-physical systems, a highly interesting class of devices that intertwines different aspects of analysis, control theory, and computer science. Cyber-physical systems are a main ingredient in the 21st century’s technology, but even so they are still remarkably difficult to design and analyse in a systematic and disciplined way.

His other main focus is quantum computing. Specifically, the development of suitable (quantitative) semantics that, among other things, tracks the use of computational resources by a quantum program. Quantum computing is a computational paradigm with the potential to provide remarkable speedups to certain families of computational problems. However, quantum programs are still highly susceptible to noise (correlated with the use of certain computational resources) which hinders their application to real-world problems.

Semantics for Hybrid Components - Categorical Tools and Techniques

Abstract: A main challenge of the 21st century is to engineer software devices that tightly interact with physical processes such as velocity, movement, energy, and time. They are currently qualified as ‘hybrid’ to emphasise this cyber-physical interaction, which forces a shift from standard software practices to a more multifaceted view that combines computer science, control theory, and analysis.

In this talk, I will systematically overview a series of category-theoretical constructions that serve as an interpretation domain for hybrid computational units and interactions between them. As an illustration of its power, I will use the framework to tackle two main problems in the hybrid systems field: the lack of a uniform semantics for different variants of hybrid automata (currently, the standard formalism for hybrid systems) and the lack of suitable semantics to interpret cyclic behaviour in hybrid component-based programming.

I will assume only basic knowledge of category theory. The talk is based on joint work with Sergey Goncharov.

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