Robin Milner à Nantes le 21 mars

The Atlanstic Federation of Labs (FR 2819)
is happy to invite you to a seminar to be
given in Nantes by professor Robin Milner.

Professor Milner is well known in the
computer science community for his
major contributions to functional
and concurrent languages.
He was awarded the prestigious 
"ACM Turing Award" in 1991.
In his seminar he will present
one of the grand challenges of the 21st
Century.

This seminar will take place
at the Faculty of Sciences
and Techniques,
University of Nantes,
amphi H, on Wednesday March 21,
at 14:00.

Amphi H is close to the LINA lab:


---------------------------------


Professor Robin Milner,
Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University,
visiting Ecole Polytechnique (Paris)
for a year as "Ile-de-France
Blaise Pascal Professeur de Recherche".

Title:

"Ubiquitous computing, models
and the informatic future"

Abstract:

"Ubiquitous Computing Systems (UCSs)
will be a dominant part of
informatics in this century.
They will be vast, will evolve,
will make
decision previously made by us,
and will interact with one another.

The problem of how to understand
them, both as designed and as they
evolve, is one of the Grand Challenges
for Computing adopted by the UK
Computing Research Committee.
Many existing and more modest computing
systems are not deeply understood
when they are specified or built;
this phenomenon appears to be a
side-effect of the tremendous market
demand that has arisen worldwide
in the past half century.

I shall argue that a more thorough
science-based approach is both
necessary and possible. We often
think in terms of models, whether
formal or not.  These models, each
involving a subset of the immense
range of concepts needed for UCSs,
should form the structure of our
science.  Even more importantly,
the relationships (either formal or
informal) among them are the cement
that will hold our tower of
models together. For example,
how do we derive a model for senior
executives from one used by
engineers in designing a platform for
business processes, or by
theoreticians in analysing it?

Many examples of such relationships
exist; we need to base our
methodologies on them, and on
more of them.  As part of the talk, I
would like to illustrate this
with my own work on mobile systems."

Robin Milner Biography:

Robin Milner graduated from
Cambridge in 1958.  After short
posts he joined
the University of Edinburgh in
1973, where he co-founded the Laboratory for
Foundation of Computer Science
in 1986.  He was elected Fellow of the Royal
Society in 1988, and in 1991
won the ACM's A.M. Turing Award. He joined
Cambridge University in 1995,
headed the Computer Laboratory there for four
years, and retired in 2001.
His research achievements
(often joint)
include:
the system LCF, a model for
many later systems for
interactive reasoning;
systems; Standard ML, an
industry-scale but rigorously
based programming
language; the Calculus of
Communicating Systems (CCS); the Pi Calculus.
Currently he works on Bigraphs,
a topographical model for
global computing.