Prakash Panangaden's Home Page

Teaching Fall 2006

• Programming Languages and Paradigms COMP 302
• Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science COMP 330

Teaching Winter 2007

• Theoretical Programming Languages: Domains, Approximation and Computability. A brief outline.

Invited Lectures

• Duality for Probabilistic Automata, presented at MFPS XXII, Genoa, Italy on 27th May 2006.
• The One Way to Quantum Computation, to be presented at ICALP XXXIII in Venice, Italy, on 13th July 2006.

Conferences and Workshops

• Organizer of the Bellairs Workshop on Mathematical Methods for Reasoning about Security Mar 19 - Mar23 2007.
• Program Committee of the 4th Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages Vienna, Austria - April 1 - 2, 2006.
• Program Committee and Local Arrangements Committee of the Association of Symbolic Logic Annual Meeting in Montreal, 17-21 May 2006.
• Program Committee of the Twenty Second Annual Conference on Mathematical Foundations Of Programming Semantics May 23-26, Genoa, Italy.
• Co-organizer with Catuscia Palamidessi of the first Printemps workshop, McGill University, Montreal, June 6th and June 7th 2006.
• Program Committee of the Fourth International Workshop on Quantum Programming Languages, Oxford, U.K., July 17,18 2006.
• Organizer, Dagstuhl Seminar 06341 on Computational Structures for Modelling Space, Time and Causality, 20-25 August 2006.
• Program Committee of Third International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems, Riverside, California, September 2006.
• Program Committee of the Twnty-Sixth International Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, December 2006.

Publications and related documents

• SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
• A book proof that parallel convergence tester cannot implement parallel or.
• A short paper showing that amb cannot be monotone in the Smyth or Plotkin sense. Mainly due to Paul B. Levy and Soren Lassen.

Slides from Presentations

• Talk at Dagstuhl on A Domain of Spcetime Intervals for General Relativity. PDF version, unprintable.
• Talk at MFPS May 2006 on Duality for Probabilistic Automata. PDF version; unprintable.
• Talk at Indiana Nov 2005 on Labelled Markov Processes. PDF version; unprintable.
• Talk at Inria May 2005 on Quantum Leader Election. PDF version; unprintable.
• Talk at MFPS May 2005 on Quantum Leader Election. PDF version; unprintable. Shorter version of the above.
• Slides for QEST 2004 talk (powerpoint)
• Talk at Dagstuhl 2004 on Causality, Domains and General Relativity. PDF version; unprintable.
• Talk at Dagstuhl 2004 on Causality, Domains and General Relativity. PS version suitable for printing
• Slides from the Opening Remarks of the Causality workshop. PDF.
• Sumati Surya's slides from the Causality Workshop in Ottawa June 26th. PDF.
• Postscript of slides from Ottawa June 15th Tutorial on Quantum Mechanics.
• Pdf (printable) version of slides from Ottawa June 15th Tutorial on Quantum Mechanics.
• Slides from Dagstuhl Talk on Metrics.

Curriculum Vitae

• CV Including publication list; ps version.
• CV Including publication list; pdf version.

Research Interests

My research area is the theory of probabilistic systems. Currently I am working on the theory of labelled Markov processes. These are probabilistic processes that interact by synchronizing on labels but in which the state spaces might be continuous. I have recently begun working on real-time probabilistic systems and a new view of probabilistic bisimulation. I also look at reward-based MDPs and together with colleagues in the RL Lab at McGill we have developed metrics for MDPs and are studying efficient ways of approximating them. I have worked on a programming language - based on the concurrent constraint programming paradigm - for defining stochastic processes, on bisimulation for continuous-state systems and on approximation of continuous-state systems by finite systems.

During my recent (2003-04) sabbatical - spent at the Computing Laboratory in Oxford - I became interested in two new topics. One is quantum computing, more specifically foundational structures in quantum computation. I worked with Vincent Danos, Ellie D'Hondt and Elham Kashefi on an algebra for the one-way model of quantum computing. The other is using domain thory to prove results about the causal structure of spacetime.

In the past, I have worked on expressiveness, the development of semantics for concurrent programming languages and the relationships between logic and concurrent computation. The main arenas for these studies have been indeterminate dataflow and concurrent constraint programming. I have also become interested in information flow in quantum systems. I have also worked on Nuclear Ideals a categorical generalization of the idea of nuclear spaces.
 

Other Information

• My birthday does not occur in the first 100000000 digits of pi.
• My Erdos number is 2.87
• An email message from one of my favourite colleagues:
  "When it comes to alcohol, I trust you completely."
• Graduate Students Summer 2006
• Personal Information
• McGill Reporter Blurb on the Leo Yaffe Award

Quote from "Rebuilding America's Defences"

Favorite Links (Work Related)

• Website of the new electronic journal: Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS).
• Electronic Resources at Shulich Library.
• Probability Links.
• American Mathematics Society.
• The SOCS Home Page
• The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Formal Methods
• The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Concurency
• The LANL Preprint Archive
• GNU Emacs, the only known text editor.

Favorite Links (Personal Interest)

• The IIT Kanpur Web Site. I am an alumnus of IIT Kanpur; Class of 1975.
• The Cricinfo Home Page
• The NASA Picture of the Day.