"Foundations" seminar

Within TEMTA119 and in collaboration with other research groups, we are organizing a "Foundations of CS and AI" seminar series. It is meant for people who like the foundations of computer science and CS's various subfields and/or who like the mathematical part of computer science.

Future Talks

Nothing yet here...

  • January 28 (2015) - waiting for volunteers.
  • Feb 4 (2015) - no seminar (Institute retreat).
  • Feb 11 (2015) - no seminar (Institute retreat).

Past Talks

  • January 21 (2025), 12:15, in room 2049, by Miika Hannula
    • Title: Dependence logic (and consistent query answering)
    • Abstract: Dependence logic extends first-order logic by introducing novel dependence atoms which explicitly assert dependence relations between variables. The aim is to obtain a formal language for modeling and reasoning about phenomena involving complex dependence notions. In general, dependence and independence are concepts that become manifest only in the presence of multitudes. To capture this, dependence logic employs team semantics which evaluates formulas over sets of variable assignments instead of single assignments, as in classical logics. This talk surveys the basic ideas and results in this field, which was introduced in 2007. Time permitting, we will revisit the theme of query evaluation, with a focus on handling uncertainty. Specifically, we will consider consistent query answering, which is a query evaluation paradigm for databases with inconsistent information. Since its inception in 1999, this topic has remained a central research area in the database theory community.
  • December 16 (2024), 16:15, in room 2049, by Miika Hannula
    • Title: Query Evaluation: Basics and Recent Developments
    • Abstract: Query evaluation is perhaps the most central problem pertaining to databases. Given a query q, a value c, and a database D, this problem is to determine whether or not c belongs to the output q(D) of the query q on the database D. Unfortunately, this problem is NP-complete even if we restrict to conjunctive queries which correspond to the most basic kind of SQL queries. What explains, then, that databases are so successful in practice? In this talk we look how theoretical investigation has helped to tame the query evaluation problem leading to efficient algorithms. We also look into recent developments regarding (a) query evaluation over inconsistent databases, and (b) application of information theory to join queries.