[Apologies for multiple copies] Dear all,
I am pleased to announce the 55th Tokyo Programming Seminar, which will be held at NII on December 18th (Tue).
Oleg Kiselyov Non-deterministic choice in a conventional programming language: Enough for logic programming?
Hugo Pacheco Bidirectional Data Transformation by Calculation
A detailed program is attached below. I'm looking forward to meeting you at the seminar.
Best regards, Kazuyuki Asada
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The 55th ToPS http://takeichi.ipl-lab.org/~tops/upcoming_seminar.html
Time: December 18th (Tue) 2012, 13:30--15:30 Place: Rm. 1208, 12F, National Institute of Informatics
Speaker: 1. Oleg Kiselyov
Non-deterministic choice in a conventional programming language: Enough for logic programming?
Abstract: Logic programming is a fascinating approach, especially for AI and natural language processing. It is greatly appealing to declaratively state the properties of the problem and let the system find the solution. Most intriguing is the ability to run programs `forwards' and `backwards'.
However, the built-in search methods of logic programming systems don't fit all problems and hardly if at all customizable. Mainly, quite many computations and models are mostly deterministic. Implementing them in a logic programming language is significantly inefficient and requires extensive use of problematic features such as cut. Another problem is interfacing logic programs with mainstream language libraries: if mode analysis is not available (as is often the case), one has to live with run-time instantiatedness errors.
An alternative to logic programming, where non-determinism is default, is a deterministic programming system (such as Scheme, OCaml, Scala or Haskell -- or even C) with (probabilistic) non-determinism as an option. Is this a good alternative? We explore this question. We will use Hansei -- a probabilistic programming system implemented as a library in OCaml -- to solve a number of classic logic programming problems, from zebra to scheduling, to parser combinators, to reversible type checking.
http://okmij.org/ftp/kakuritu/logic-programming.html
2. Hugo Pacheco
Bidirectional Data Transformation by Calculation
Abstract: The advent of bidirectional programming, in recent years, has led to the development of a vast number of approaches from various computer science disciplines. These are often based on domain-specific languages in which a program can be read both as a forward and a backward transformation that satisfy some desirable consistency properties.
Despite the high demand and recognized potential of intrinsically bidirectional languages, they have still not matured to the point of mainstream adoption. We contemplate some usually disregarded features of bidirectional transformation languages that are vital for deployment at a larger scale. The first concerns efficiency. Most of these languages provide a rich set of primitive combinators that can be composed to build more sophisticated transformations. Although convenient, such compositional languages are plagued by inefficiency and their optimization is mandatory for a serious application. The second relates to configurability. As update translation is inherently ambiguous, users shall be allowed to control the choice of a suitable strategy. The third regards genericity. Writing a bidirectional transformation typically implies describing the concrete steps that convert values in a source schema to values a target schema, making it impractical to express very complex transformations, and practical tools shall support concise and generic coding patterns.