PhD%20courses

= PhD Courses =

== Specifying and Reasoning About Computational Systems ==

'''Time''': Mondays 10:00 - 12:00, starting April 27, 2012

'''Location''': 2A20

'''Speaker''': Gopalan Nadathur, University of Minnesota, visiting Velux professor.

'''Homepage''': http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~gopalan/courses/ITU-2012/

'''Course description''': The course will discuss a a logical approach to specifying, prototyping and reasoning about formal systems that are presented via syntax-directed rules. This style of description includes, for example, the typical presentation of typing and evaluation relations for programming languages, proof systems for varied logics, software modelling languages and software specifications, and process calculi and encodings of concurrent systems. Many of these systems characterize relations over syntactic objects that involve binding, a notion whose correct treatment in specification and reasoning tasks has proven to be surprisingly tricky. The first part of the course will expose a specification language based on a higher-order logic that provides a natural and effective means for formalizing such systems. This part will also develop the proof-theoretic and computational properties of the specification language that allows it to be used also as a means for programming and prototyping. The second part of the course will consider logics for reasoning about formalizations in the specification language. Such logics must internalize the "closed world" assumption inherent to specifications and should support reasoning principles such as induction. A treatment of these aspects will be developed and mechanisms for reasoning effectively in the presence of binding notions will also be discussed. Finally, the two-level logic approach will be exposed. This approach smoothly integrates specification, prototyping and reasoning and also allows meta-theoretic properties of the specification logic to be used to advantage. Implementations of the specification and reasoning logics in the form of the Teyjus, Bedwyr and Abella systems will be used to provide concreteness to the foundational and methodological discussions.

== Trusting Information-Technology Truth and Transparency == We are orgnizing a [http://www.itu.dk/en/Forskning/Phd-uddannelsen/PhD-Courses/PhD%20Courses%202011/Trusting%20Information-%20Technology%20Truth%20and%20Transparency PhD course] on trust.

'''Time''': Monday, October 10th to Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

'''Course description''': This PhD course aims to examine in ethnographic detail the notion of trust and its engagement with concepts and practices of information. As a multivalent concept with a high social currency (especially but not only in the modern West), trust has become a subject of study for numerous social sciences, encapsulating a wide spectrum of assumptions and perspectives. These include but are not limited to anthropological and sociological perspectives on risk society and audit culture, and STS (science and technology studies) and organizational approaches to understanding relations between technological infrastructures and trustworthy information.

In the “information age”, trust is often associated with free access to data and the idea of transparency. Issues of trust are brought into relief wherever there are perceived to be exchanges – or the possibility of appropriation - of information. However, these exchanges and the relations they entail take many different forms and include many different types of actors. More generally, trust is related to information in the sense that it is perceived to span the gap between what is known and what is unknown.

This PhD course looks to critically explore the notion of trust, with an emphasis on its relation to informational practices, calling on a broad range of social scientific approaches and engaging with a wide range of empirical contexts.

For more information please consult the [http://www.itu.dk/en/Forskning/Phd-uddannelsen/PhD-Courses/PhD%20Courses%202011/Trusting%20Information-%20Technology%20Truth%20and%20Transparency course homepage].