This is the first in a new series of seminars in the Department of Computing featuring exciting speakers from a wide range of areas in Computer Science. The talks are meant to be technical but understandable to everyone in the audience from graduate students to professors. Standing lunch will follow the talk to interact with the speaker and fellow attendees. Please email Alessio if you’d like to meet Joel in the afternoon.
Abstract
Linear dynamical systems, both discrete and continuous, permeate vast areas of mathematics, physics, and computer science. In this talk, we consider a selection of natural decision problems for linear dynamical systems, such as reachability of a given hyperplane. Such problems have applications in a wide array of scientific areas, ranging from theoretical biology and software verification to quantum computing and statistical physics. Perhaps surprisingly, the study of decidability and complexity questions for linear dynamical systems involves techniques from a variety of mathematical fields, including analytic and algebraic number theory, Diophantine geometry, and real algebraic geometry. I will survey some of the known results as well as recent advances and open problems. This talk is intended for a general scientific audience; in particular no prior knowledge of dynamical systems and/or related mathematical formalisms is assumed.
Biography
Joel Ouaknine is Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, and Fellow of St John’s College. He holds a BSc and MSc in Mathematics from McGill University, and received his PhD in Computer Science from Oxford in 2001. He subsequently did postdoctoral work at Tulane University and Carnegie Mellon University, and more recently held a visiting professorship at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Cachan, France. In both 2007 and 2008 he received an Outstanding Teaching Award from Oxford University, and the following year he was awarded an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship, enabling him to focus (almost) exclusively on research for a period of five years. He is the recipient of the 2010 Roger Needham Award, given annually “for a distinguished research contribution in Computer Science by a UK-based researcher within ten years of his or her PhD.” In 2015, he was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant, again allowing him to focus mainly on research for a five-year period. His research interests include the automated verification of real-time, probabilistic, and infinite-state systems (e.g. model-checking algorithms, synthesis problems, complexity), logic and applications to verification, decision and synthesis problems for linear dynamical systems, automated software analysis, concurrency, and theoretical computer science.