I am Professor of Trustworthy Software Technologies at Taltech. The position is a research measure of the IT Academy programme, funded by the Estonian State and the European Social Fund. I lead the Laboratory for Compositional Systems and Methods. In 2021-25 I am also PI of the Estonian Research Council grant PRG1210, Automata in Learning, Interaction and Concurrency (ALICE).
My research can be understood as the study of how to connect open systems (of various kinds: programs, networks, computing devices, circuits, ...) in a way that the description of the connections--i.e. the language that we describe subsystems and how to compose them---is compatible with the behaviour of the system. Therefore, what can be observed of the global system is entirely derivable from the observations made of the component subsystems. This is because each composition operation in the language we use for describing systems gives rise to an analogous operation on the behaviours. This property is known as compositionality.
I focus on compositional modelling of systems, developing the underlying mathematics (usually category theory), and applying it to real-life problems such as verification. I work on graph transformation, Petri nets, process algebras, dynamical and cyberphysical systems, as well as mainstream concurrent programming. Since 2015, I write the Graphical Linear Algebra blog about rediscovering linear algebra in a compositional way, with string diagrams.
- Upcoming meetings
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- 26th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FoSSaCS 2023), co-chair (with Orna Kupferman), dates TBA, Paris, France
- Recent meetings
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- Eighth Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO 8), Tallinn, 13-14 December 2021
- Organiser, 46th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, Tallinn, Estonia, August 23-27, 2021
- Organisations
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- Member of Expert Panel on Computer Science and Informatics, National Science Centre NCN, Poland
- Associate Editor, Compositionality
- Associate Editor, Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, CUP
- IFIP Working Group 2.2, Formal Description of Programming Concepts
- IFIP Working Group 1.3, Foundations of System Specification
- ACM SigLOG
- Programme committees
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2023
- 38th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2023)
- 16th International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2023)
2022
- 33rd International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2022)
- 19th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL 2022)
- 26th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FoSSaCS 2023)
- 48th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science (SOFSEM 2023)
- 9th Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO 9)
2021
- 32nd International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2021)
- 12th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams (Diagrams 2021)
- 30th EACSL Annual Conference on Computer Science Logic (CSL 2022)
- 25th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FoSSaCS 2022)
- International Conference on Software Testing, Machine Learning and Complex Process Analysis, TMPA-2021
- Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics and Cognitive Science (SEMSPACE 2021)
2020
- 35th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2020)
- 17th International Conference on Quantum and Physics Logic (QPL 2020)
- 7th Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO 7)
- 3rd IFIP WG 1.8 International Conference on Topics in Theoretical Computer Science, Track B: Logic, Semantics, and Programming Theory (TTCS 2020)
- 13th International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2020)
- Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics and Cognitive Science (SEMSPACE 2020)
2019
- 46th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2019), Track B
- 44th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2019)
- Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics and Cognitive Science 2019 (SEMSPACE 2019)
- Quantum Physics and Logic 2019 (QPL 2019)
- Applied Category Theory 2019 (ACT 2019)
- International Conference on Software Testing, Machine Learning and Complex Process Analysis (TMPA 2019)
- Third Workshop on String Diagrams in Computation, Logic and Physics (STRINGS 3)
- 6th Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO 6)
- PhD students
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2011-15 Owen Stephens, Compositional Specification and Reachability Checking of Net Systems, ECS, University of Southampton, with Julian Rathke 2012-15 Fabio Zanasi, Interacting Hopf Algebras: the Theory of Linear Systems, Ecole Normale Supérieure Lyon, with Filippo Bonchi 2016-20 Jens Seeber, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Logical Completeness for String Diagrams, IMT School for Advances Studies, Lucca, with Filippo Bonchi 2018- Paul Wilson, ECS, with Fabio Zanasi 2019- Nathan Haydon, TTU 2019- Chad Nester, TTU 2019- Elena di Lavore, TTU 2019- Mario Román, TTU 2020- Matt Earnshaw, TTU 2020- Diana Kessler, TTU, with Amar Hadzihasanovic - Publications