Rocco de Nicola
Programming and Reasoning on Global Computers with Evolving Topologies
We shall present a formal description language for modelling applications over global computing systems and its associated abstract semantics as determined by intuitive notions of observables. The main features of the language are explicit distribution, internode connections, remote operations, process mobility and asynchronous communication through distributed tuple spaces.

We will also show how the language, and the associated semantic theories, can be extended to include more advanced features such as failures and dynamic connections. The descriptive and analytical power of the formalisms will be demonstrated by specifying a few applications and by showing how the semantic theories can be exploited to equationally establish crucial properties of the specified systems.

Prof. De Nicola is a full professor at Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica of the University of Florence (Italy) since 1995. He received the Laurea degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 1978 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh (UK) in 1985. From 1990 till 1995, he has been a full professor at the Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione of the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' (Italy). Before that he was a full time researcher at IEI-CNR, Pisa and worked at Edinburgh University and for Italtel in Milano.

De Nicola's research interests are centered around design methods and formal specifications and their use for the verification of distributed concurrent systems. He is the author of over eighty publications in international journals or edited conference proceedings and is a member of the IFIP W.G. 2.2. He has been an "invited speaker" at various international conferences and schools and has been member of many program committees of international conferences and workshops. De Nicola has been Program Chair for PPDP 2001 and COORDINATION 2004 and is among ISI HiglyCited researchers.

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