Talk session

A tale of lambda

“In the first part of my talk I will share with you some memories of my long carrier. Then I will try to walk with you in the jungle of formal methods under the pacifying umbrella of types.”

Instructor: Mariangiola Dezani was nominated full professor of Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Torino at 35 in 1981. Since 1/11/2017 she is emeritus professor of “Foundations of Computer Science” at the University of Torino. Dezani was Director of the Phd Program in Computer Science of University of Torino (from 1995 to 2001 and from 2008 to 2016) and member of the board of the Doctoral School of Sciences and Innovative Technologies at her university. Dezani became EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science) Fellow in 2015. The Fellow status is conferred upon a person having a track record of intellectual and organisational leadership within the EATCS community. Associations: Dezani is member of IFIP W.G.2.2 on “Formal Description of Program- ming Concepts” since 1984 , member of the EATCS Council from 1998 to 2005, member of the “Academia Europaea” since 1994. Dezani has co-authored more than 200 papers with in total more than 8000 citations: her H-index is 41. These papers have been published in prestigious scientific journals ISI indexed and in proceedings of major, highly competitive, peer reviewed international conferences. The paper “Foundations of Session Types”, coauthored with Giuseppe Castagna, Elena Giachino and Luca Padovani, has won the PPDP Most Influential Paper 10-Year Award. The paper “On the Preciseness of Subtyping in Session Types”, coauthored with Tzu-Chun Chen, and Nobuko Yoshida, has won the PPDP Most Influential Paper 10-Year Award. Dezani research followed a clear path since the beginning, proposing typing systems along the evolution of programming languages: from lambda-calculus models in the 80s, to object orientation in the 90s, to more dynamic and distributed contexts with behavioural types for web services. The main scientific achievement in the past years is when in the 80s she introduced with other researchers intersection type assignment systems, which were largely used as finitary descriptions of lambda-models. The current research activity of Dezani is mainly devoted to the study of session types for assuring safety of communication protocols.