Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
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Computer Science Seminar

Enclosing Hybrid Behavior up to and Beyond a Zeno Point

Seminar Slides: Download (PDF)

When: Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Walid Taha, Halmstad University, Sweden and Rice University

Host: Prof. Albert Cheng

Even simple hybrid systems like the classic bouncing ball can exhibit Zeno behaviors. The existence of this type of behavior has so far forced simulators to either ignore some events or risk looping indefinitely.

This in turn forces modelers to either insert ad hoc restrictions to circumvent Zeno behavior or to abandon hybrid modeling. To address this problem, we take a fresh look at event detection and localization. A key insight that emerges from this investigation is that an enclosure for a given time interval can be valid independently of the occurrence of a given event. Such an event can then even occur an unbounded number of times, thus making it possible to handle certain types of Zeno behavior.

This work is joint with Michal Konecny, Adam Duracz, Jan Duracz, and Aaron Ames.

Bio:
Walid Taha is a Professor of Computer Science at Halmstad University.  He is interested in the design, semantics, and implementation of programming and hardware description languages.  His current research focus is on modeling, simulation, and verification of cyberphysical systems, and in particular the Acumen http://www.acumen-language.org/ modeling language.

Taha has been the principal investigator on a number of research awards and contracts from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Semi-conductor Research Consortium (SRC), and Texas Advanced Technology Program (ATP).  He received an NSF CAREER award to develop Java Mint.  He founded the ACM Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE), the IFIP Working Group on Program Generation (WG 2.11), and the Middle Earth Programming Languages Seminar (MEPLS).  Taha chaired the 2009 IFIP Working Conference on Domain Specific Languages.  According to Google Scholar, Taha's publications had over 2,400 citations and an h-index of 26.
http://scholar.google.se/citations?user=YGjr_pUAAAAJ&hl=en.

Prof. Taha is also a part-time full professor at Rice University.