May 16th, 2019
In recent years, concurrent Kleene algebra (CKA), an extension of Kleene Algebra (KA) that includes concurrent composition as a first-class citizen, has been proposed by Hoare et al. as a setting to study the algebraic properties of concurrent composition as an operator on programs. Orthogonally, based on KA, Foster et al proposed NetKAT, a domain-specific language that can be used to program and verify policies of Software Defined Networks. in this talk, we will show how to develop a concurrent extension of NetKAT based on CKA, which supports expressing and verifying the concurrent filtering of packets — on the same network device, or possibly also distributed among different devices. This extension enables automated algebraic verification of properties that are relevant for (concurrent) packet processing in networks. This is joint work with Tobias Kappe and others, carried within the CoNeCo project (for more info, see the CoNeCo website).
Alexandra Silva is a theoretical computer scientist whose main research focuses on semantics of programming languages and modular development of algorithms for computational models. A lot of her work uses the unifying perspective offered by coalgebra, a mathematical framework established in the last decades.
Alexandra is currently a Professor of Algebra, Semantics, and Computation at University College London. Previously, she was an assistant professor in Nijmegen and a post-doc at Cornell University, with Prof. Dexter Kozen, and a PhD student at the Dutch national research center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), under the supervision of Prof. Jan Rutten and Dr. Marcello Bonsangue.
She was the recipient of the Needham Award 2018, the Presburger Award 2017, the Leverhulme prize 2016, and an ERC starting Grant in 2015.
