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<B>Links</B><BR>+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/index.html">Home</A><BR>+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/publications.html">Publications</A><BR>+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/teaching.html">Teaching</A><BR>+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/travelling.html">Recent Talks</A><BR>+ −
<A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/">My Research Group</A>+ −
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<B>Handy Information</B><BR>+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/logic.html">People in Logic</A><BR> + −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/programming.html">Programming Languages</A><BR> + −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/misc.html">Miscellaneous</A>+ −
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<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Cookbook/">+ −
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<H1>Christian Urban</H1>+ −
+ −
<B>E-mail</B> + −
christian.urban <I>at</I> kcl ac uk<BR>+ −
<BR>+ −
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<B>Address</B> + −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk">Department of Informatics</A>,+ −
<A HREF="http://www.kcl.ac.uk">King's College London</A>,+ −
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. My office is S1.27 on the 1st floor of the Strand Building. + −
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<p>+ −
<IMG SRC="new.gif" ALT="" style="" align="left"><A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Cookbook" target="_top">Isabelle Programming Tutorial</A> (draft of a 200-page tutorial on Isabelle programming)<BR><BR>+ −
<IMG SRC="new.gif" ALT="" style="" align="left"><A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/itp-2015/">ITP'15</A> will take place in Nanjing organised by Xingyuan Zhang and me<BR>+ −
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<B>Current Position</B> + −
I am a lecturer in the Department of Informatics at King's College London.+ −
This is similar to a position of an assistant professor in other places. In 2011,+ −
I was also offered a lectureship + −
<A HREF="http://www.it.uu.se/" TITLE="Uppsala">here</A>, an associate professorship + −
<A HREF="http://www.itu.dk/en/" TITLE="ITU, Copenhagen">here</A>,+ −
and full professorships + −
<A HREF="http://www.ustcsz.edu.cn/kedweb/" TITLE="IAS, Suzhou">here</A> and + −
<A HREF="http://202.120.81.220/index.aspx" TITLE="Shanghai">here</A>. + −
I thank all people involved for their efforts.+ −
<P>+ −
+ −
<B>Past Positions</B> + −
In April 2006, I was awarded an <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether">Emmy-Noether</A> + −
<A HREF="http://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/individual/emmy_noether/in_brief/index.html">fellowship</A>, which I held at the <A HREF="http://www.in.tum.de/en.html">TU Munich</A> until+ −
September 2011.+ −
Between September 2008 and February 2009, I was an invited research scientist in + −
the <A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/">Department of Computer Science</A> in Princeton.+ −
In 2004/05 I was an Alexander-von-Humboldt fellow in Munich and + −
from 2000 until 2004 I was awarded a Research Fellowship in Cambridge. Before that+ −
I did my PhD in Cambridge funded by two scholarships from the German Academic Exchange + −
Service (<A HREF="http://www.daad.de/index.html">DAAD</A>).+ −
<P>+ −
+ −
<B>Skolem Award</B> Together with+ −
<A HREF="http://www.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr/~tasson/">Christine Tasson</A>, I was awarded a+ −
<A HREF="http://www.cadeinc.org/SkolemAward.html">Thoralf Skolem Award</A>, a ten-year+ −
test-of-time award from CADE, for our+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Publications/nom-cade-05.ps">paper</A>+ −
on Nominal Techniques in Isabelle/HOL from 2005.+ −
<P>+ −
+ −
<B>Research Interests</B> theorem provers, verification, programming languages, compilers, + −
algorithms, proof theory, type systems, concurrency, lambda calculus, unification, + −
regular expressions, computability, complexity, functional and logic programming.+ −
<P>+ −
+ −
<B>Conferences</B>+ −
UNIF'06 (member of PC), + −
<A HREF="http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~bpientka/lfmtp07">LFMTP'07</A> (member of PC), + −
<A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/lfmtp08/">LFMTP'08</A> (PC co-chair), + −
<A HREF="http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sweirich/wmm/">WMM'08</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.mat.ufmg.br/lsfa2008/">LSFA'08</A> (invited speaker),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/maribel/TAASN.html">TAASN'09</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://lsfa09.cic.unb.br/">LSFA'09</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/tphols09/idw.html">IDW'09</A> (organiser),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~sweirich/wmm/wmm09.html">WMM'09</A> (PC chair),+ −
<A HREF="https://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/tphols09/">TPHOLs'09</A> (PC co-chair),+ −
<A HREF="http://dream.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/automatheo-2010/">Automatheo'10</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.floc-conference.org/">ITP'10</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/maribel/UNIF/UNIF.html">UNIF'10</A> (invited speaker),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/wmm/">WMM'10</A> (invited speaker),+ −
<A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/idw10/idw.html">IDW'10</A> (co-organiser),+ −
CPP'11 (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.rdp2011.uns.ac.rs/rta/">RTA'11</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://lfmtp11.cs.umn.edu">LFMTP'11</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uwyo.edu/~ruben/itp-2014">ITP'14</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.cicm-conference.org/2015/cicm.php?event=mkm">MKM'15</A> (member of PC),+ −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/itp-2015/">ITP'15</A> (PC co-chair)+ −
<P>+ −
+ −
<B>Current PhD</B> Fahad Ausaf<BR>+ −
<B>Former RAs</B> Chunhan Wu, <A HREF="http://cl-informatik.uibk.ac.at/users/cek/">Cezary Kaliszyk</A>, + −
<A HREF="http://dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr/~narboux/">Julien Narboux</A>+ −
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<B>Nominal Isabelle</B> + −
I currently work on Nominal + −
<A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de">Isabelle</A> 2. This is joint work with + −
<A HREF="http://wwwbroy.in.tum.de/~berghofe/">Dr Stefan Berghofer</A>,+ −
<A HREF="http://www.lri.fr/~wenzel/">Dr Markus Wenzel</A>,+ −
<A HREF="http://cl-informatik.uibk.ac.at/users/cek/">Dr Cezary Kaliszyk</A>,+ −
<A HREF="http://user.it.uu.se/~tjawe125/">Dr Tjark Weber</A> and + −
the Isabelle-team in Munich.+ −
Many of the theoretical ideas originate from the nominal logic project - a wonderful project headed + −
by <A HREF="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~amp12/">Prof. Andrew Pitts</A>. + −
The aim of my work is to make formal reasoning involving binders as simple as + −
on paper and the hope is to lure + −
<A HREF="http://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-bin/poplmark/index.php?title=The_POPLmark_Challenge#Vision">masses</A> to automated+ −
theorem proving. My funding for this work was provided in 2004 and 2005 by a research + −
fellowship from the + −
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt">Alexander-von-Humboldt</A>+ −
<A HREF="http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/home.html">foundation</A>. During this time I was a visitor in the group of + −
<A HREF="http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~schwicht/">Prof. Helmut Schwichtenberg</A>.+ −
Since 2006 this work is supported by an+ −
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether">Emmy-Noether</A> + −
<A HREF="http://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/individual/emmy_noether/in_brief/index.html">fellowship</A>.+ −
There is a <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/">webpage</A> and a+ −
<A HREF="https://mailmanbroy.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/mailman/listinfo/nominal-isabelle">mailing list</A> + −
about Nominal Isabelle. It also includes a list of projects that use Nominal Isabelle.+ −
Users of Nominal Isabelle had their papers appearing at LICS, POPL, FOSSACS, SOS, TPHOLs, CPP, SEFM and+ −
in the Journal of Automated Reasoning.+ −
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<B>Myhill-Nerode and Regular Expressions</B> + −
Out of frustration of having to teach reasoning in theorem provers with worn-out examples like+ −
fib and even/odd, we implemented a large part of regular language theory in Isabelle/HOL.+ −
This <A HREF="http://afp.sourceforge.net/devel-entries/Myhill-Nerode.shtml">implementation</A> + −
gives rise to much more interesting examples, as shown + −
<A HREF="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/papers/regexp/jfp.pdf">here</A> and + −
<A HREF="http://ropas.snu.ac.kr/~kwang/paper/06-jfp-yi.pdf">here</A>. It turns out that+ −
formalisations of automata theory are a huge + −
<A HREF="https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/cl-isabelle-users/2005-September/msg00012.html">pain</A> + −
in theorem provers, especially in those that are based on HOL. + −
We therefore went against the + −
<A HREF="http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~kozen/papers/papers_by_year.htm#K97a">mainstream</A> + −
and used in our formalisation regular expressions exclusively,+ −
because they are much more convenient for formal reasoning. The results we+ −
formalised include: the Myhill-Nerode theorem, the closure of regular languages+ −
under complementation, finiteness of derivatives of regular expressions and a surprising + −
result about Subseq, which according to + −
this + −
<A HREF="http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2006/01/theorem-that-should-be-better-known.html">blog</A> + −
should be better known. We also answered a+ −
<A HREF="http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2013/02/proving-dfa-langs-closed-under-concat.html">question</A> from the same blog about+ −
"proving Reg-exp-langs [being] closed under complementation without using equiv to DFA's"....yes we can!+ −
This is joint work with Prof. Xingyuan+ −
Zhang and his student Chunhan Wu from the + −
<A HREF="http://www.ust.com.cn/">PLA University of Science and Technology</A> in Nanjing. + −
My funding for this work came from the + −
<A HREF="http://www.sinogermanscience.org.cn/">Chinese-German Research Centre</A>. + −
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<B>Priority Inheritance</B>+ −
In real-time operating systems with processes, resource locking and+ −
priority scheduling, one faces the problem of indefinite+ −
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_inversion">priority inversion</A> (processes+ −
with lower priority block processes with higher priority). If you do not prevent this problem,+ −
then processes can behave quite erratically, as <A HREF="http://www.nasa.gov">NASA</A> found out the+ −
<A HREF="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.54.html#subj6">hard</A> way with their+ −
<A HREF="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars-pathfinder/index.html">Mars Pathfinder mission</A>.+ −
The priority inheritance protocol is a widely used schedulling algorithm that prevents+ −
priority inversion. However, the <A HREF="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/12.57058">original paper</A>+ −
describing this algorithm contains an incorrect algorithm and a bogus correctness proof+ −
(this seems to be the only "proof" about priority inheritance in the literature). + −
+ −
We formalised the priority inheritance protocol, including a generalisation+ −
of the original work.+ −
+ −
using the inductive method we learned from+ −
<A HREF="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/">Prof. Larry Paulson</A>.+ −
While the problem with the original algorithm was already known, the incorrect+ −
specification seems to be still in use + −
+ −
<A HREF="http://mcs.une.edu.au/%7Eiam/Data/threads/node15.html">here</A>+ −
<A HREF="http://ems2.be/Portals/6/course_docs/OS_pathfinder_failure.ppt"> + −
+ −
This is joint work with Prof. Xingyuan Zhang and his student Chunhan Wu from the + −
<A HREF="http://www.ust.com.cn/">PLA University of Science and Technology</A> in Nanjing. + −
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<B>Nominal Unification and Alpha-Prolog</B> + −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Unification">Nominal unification</A> is one outcome of + −
my involvement in the nominal logic project in Cambridge. Another is the logic programming language + −
alpha-Prolog (joint work with <A HREF="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcheney/">Dr James Cheney</A>), + −
which uses nominal unification - click for details + −
<A HREF="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcheney/programs/aprolog/">here</A>.+ −
The nominal unification algorithm has been + −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Unification">formally verified</A> in Isabelle. This + −
was possible since this unification algorithm is formulated in a simple first-order language + −
(unlike other algorithms for higher-order unification). + −
<A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/">Prof. Daniel Friedman</A> and his group use nominal + −
unification in their alpha-Kanren system implemented in Scheme. + −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/maribel/">Prof. Maribel Fernandez</A> and her student+ −
improved the nominal unification algorithm to be quadratic. + −
My funding for this work was provided through a research fellowship from + −
<A HREF="http://www.corpus.cam.ac.uk">Corpus Christi College</A>, Cambridge. + −
</TD>+ −
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<B>Classical Logic</B>+ −
I was Ph.D. student in the University of Cambridge + −
<A HREF="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk">Computer Laboratory</A>+ −
and for three years + −
called Gonville and Caius College my home. I was very lucky to have + −
<A HREF="https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=labs:bio:0:2044">Dr Gavin Bierman</A>+ −
as supervisor. My research in Cambridge was also very much influenced by + −
<A HREF="http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~martin/">Prof. Martin Hyland</A>.+ −
Some details on my thesis "Classical Logic and Computation" are + −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/PhD/index.html">elsewhere</A>, including+ −
a <A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Cut/cutapplet.html">Java Applet</A> that + −
'visualises' some of the results from the thesis. I completed the writing of+ −
the thesis in <A HREF="http://iml.univ-mrs.fr/ldp/">Marseille</A> in the group of + −
<A HREF="http://iml.univ-mrs.fr/~girard/">Prof. Jean-Yves Girard</A>. My study in + −
Cambridge was funded by two <A HREF="http://www.daad.de/index.html">scholarships</a> + −
from the German government; my year in Marseille by a TMR-fellowship from the EU. + −
My PhD was also one starting point for the EPSRC Project on the Semantics of Classical + −
Proofs. The strong normalisation result in the PhD has been used in 2007 by + −
<A HREF="http://www.loria.fr/~ckirchne/hot.html">Prof. Claude Kirchner</A> and his + −
students for proving consistency of their superdeduction system lemuridae.+ −
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<B>Forum</B> + −
I implemented Forum, a programming language based on classical linear logic, + −
as my M.Phil. thesis. This was joint work with + −
<A HREF="http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rd/">Dr Roy Dyckhoff</A>. + −
Details can be found + −
<A HREF="http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rd/logic/nonmac/">here</A> and+ −
<A HREF="http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/Labo/Dale.Miller/forum/">here</A>. During my+ −
M.Phil study I spent one month in Philadelphia invited by + −
<A HREF="http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~dale/">Prof. Dale Miller</A>.+ −
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<B>G4ip</B> An implementation of G4ip using the imperative language Pizza can be found + −
<A HREF="http://www.inf.kcl.ac.uk/staff/urbanc/Prover/index.html">here</A>.+ −
<A HREF="http://pizzacompiler.sourceforge.net">Pizza</A>, written around 1996, is a conservative + −
extension of Java and a precursor of Scala. My implementation illustrates the technique of + −
success continuations in proof search.+ −
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