Postgraduate Course: Logic and Automata (Level 11) (INFR11051)
Course Outline
| School | School of Informatics |
College | College of Science and Engineering |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | Automata are a natural procedural counterpart of declarative, or logical formalisms that appear in various areas of computer science. The most visible applications of the logic/automata connections are in the areas of formal verification, XML, and decidability of logical theories. In verification, automata are used to reason about infinite computations; in XML, they are used to
specify and transform tree-structured documents.
While all computer scientists see finite-state automata over strings, it is other types of automata that are commonly used in applications nowadays: they differ in structures over which they run (strings or trees, finite or infinite), and the mode of running (deterministic,
nondeterministic, alternating).
The course is about these models of automata, their logical
counterparts, and applications of the logic/automata connections in various areas of computer science. |
| Course description |
Topics include:
- automata on finite strings - First-order, Second-order, and Monadic Second-order logics - Buchi's theorem, automata/logic connection - First-order logic on strings, star-free languages - Tree automata on finite trees, Thatcher-Wright theorem - Automata over unranked trees, XML applications - Infinite strings and logics over them - Automata over infinite strings; closure properties; logical characterisation - First-order over infinite words, temporal logics, verification problems - LTL to automata translation - Alternating automata, decision problems, connections with LTL - Automata over infinite trees - Rabin's theorem - Decidability of logical theories; applications in software verification
Relevant QAA Computing Curriculum Sections: Not yet available
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | Students MUST NOT also be taking
Logic and Automata (Level 10) (INFR10030)
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Other requirements | For Informatics PG and final year MInf students only, or by special permission of the School. Informatics 2D is strongly recommended.
Students should understand the following topics:
Computation: the definition as acceptor and transducer, deterministic/non deterministic machines, regular expressions, operations on FSMs
Propositional and predicate logic
Context-free languages and Push-down automata
Turing machines and computability |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
1 - Students will be able to identify different models of
automata, in particular, automata on finite trees, infinite strings, infinite trees, as well as different running modes of automata: deterministic, nondeterministic, alternating.
2 - Students will be able to translate logical specifications into automata;
3 - Students will know how to solve decision problems for
different types of automata and their complexity.
4 - Students will know how to use logical formalisms and automata in specifying software and hardware properties, and how to use automata decision problems for solving verification problems.
5 - Students will know how logical and automata formalisms
influence the design of XML schemas and query languages.
6 - Students will learn how automata provide algorithms for
deciding logical theories, and how these decision procedures are used in practice.
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Reading List
| Not yet available |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Michael Rovatsos
Tel: (0131 6)51 3263
Email: mrovatso@inf.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Kate Weston
Tel: (0131 6)50 2692
Email: Kate.Weston@ed.ac.uk |
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