Alexandra Silva

Citation:

Silva A.  2010.  Kleene Coalgebra.

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Abstract:

Computer systems have widely spread since their appearance, and they now play a crucial role in many daily activities, with their deployment ranging from small home appliances to safety critical components, such as airplane or automobile control systems. Accidents caused by either hardware or software failure can have disastrous consequences, leading to the loss of human lives or causing enormous financial drawbacks. One of the greatest challenges of computer science is to cope with the fast evolution of computer systems and to develop formal techniques which facilitate the construction of dependable software and hardware systems. Since the early days of computer science, many scientists have searched for suitable models of computation and for specification languages that are appropriate for reasoning about such models. When devising a model for a particular system, there is a need to encode different features which capture the inherent behavior of the system. For instance, some systems have deterministic behavior (a calculator or an elevator), whereas others have inherently non-deterministic or probabilistic behavior (think of a casino slot machine). The rapidly increasing complexity of systems demands for compositional and unifying models of computation, as well as general methods and guidelines to derive specification languages.

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