Title: Rule Formats for Structural Operational Semantics: A Very Short
Introduction

Speaker: Luca Aceto (ICE-TCS, School of Computer Science,
                     Reykjavik University)
         http://www.ru.is/~luca/

Time: 15:00, Thursday, 21st November 2013

Venue: Lecture Room, 3rd Floor, Building #5, State Key Laboratory of
Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

Operational semantics describes the behaviour of programs in a language
in terms of their execution on an abstract machine, which is often
represented as a, possibly infinite, state machine. Structural Operational
Semantics is a rule-based and syntax-driven approach to giving operational
semantics to programming and specification languages.

In this introductory talk, I will discuss some results in the theory of
Structural Operational Semantics. These general results aim at ensuring
syntactically that (fragments of) programming and specification languages
enjoy some desirable semantic property, and are formulated in terms of
syntactic templates for operational semantics, called rule formats.

The talk will start from first principles and will assume no previous
knowledge of the area. Some familiarity with Milner's CCS and
bisimilarity will help, but is not a prerequisite.