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Selected Papers of the 6th Conference on Algebra and Coalgebra in Computer Science (CALCO 2015)
Editors: Lawrence S. Moss, Paweł Sobociński
1. A Recipe for State-and-Effect Triangles
In the semantics of programming languages one can view programs as state transformers, or as predicate transformers. Recently the author has introduced state-and-effect triangles which capture this situation categorically, involving an adjunction between state- and predicate-transformers. The current paper exploits a classical result in category theory, part of Jon Beck's monadicity theorem, to systematically construct such a state-and-effect triangle from an adjunction. The power of this construction is illustrated in many examples, covering many monads occurring in program semantics, including (probabilistic) power domains.
2. A Categorical Approach to Syntactic Monoids
The syntactic monoid of a language is generalized to the level of a symmetric monoidal closed category $\mathcal D$. This allows for a uniform treatment of several notions of syntactic algebras known in the literature, including the syntactic monoids of Rabin and Scott ($\mathcal D=$ sets), the syntactic ordered monoids of Pin ($\mathcal D =$ posets), the syntactic semirings of Polák ($\mathcal D=$ semilattices), and the syntactic associative algebras of Reutenauer ($\mathcal D$ = vector spaces). Assuming that $\mathcal D$ is a commutative variety of algebras or ordered algebras, we prove that the syntactic $\mathcal D$-monoid of a language $L$ can be constructed as a quotient of a free $\mathcal D$-monoid modulo the syntactic congruence of $L$, and that it is isomorphic to the transition $\mathcal D$-monoid of the minimal automaton for $L$ in $\mathcal D$. Furthermore, in the case where the variety $\mathcal D$ is locally finite, we characterize the regular languages as precisely the languages with finite syntactic $\mathcal D$-monoids.
3. Coalgebraic Infinite Traces and Kleisli Simulations
Kleisli simulation is a categorical notion introduced by Hasuo to verify finite trace inclusion. They allow us to give definitions of forward and backward simulation for various types of systems. A generic categorical theory behind Kleisli simulation has been developed and it guarantees the soundness of those simulations with respect to finite trace semantics. Moreover, those simulations can be aided by forward partial execution (FPE)---a categorical transformation of systems previously introduced by the authors. In this paper, we give Kleisli simulation a theoretical foundation that assures its soundness also with respect to infinitary traces. There, following Jacobs' work, infinitary trace semantics is characterized as the "largest homomorphism." It turns out that soundness of forward simulations is rather straightforward; that of backward simulation holds too, although it requires certain additional conditions and its proof is more involved. We also show that FPE can be successfully employed in the infinitary trace setting to enhance the applicability of Kleisli simulations as witnesses of trace inclusion. Our framework is parameterized in the monad for branching as well as in the functor for linear-time behaviors; for the former we mainly use the powerset monad (for nondeterminism), the sub-Giry monad (for probability), and the lift monad (for exception).
4. Coalgebraic Behavioral Metrics
We study different behavioral metrics, such as those arising from both branching and linear-time semantics, in a coalgebraic setting. Given a coalgebra $\alpha\colon X \to HX$ for a functor $H \colon \mathrm{Set}\to \mathrm{Set}$, we define a framework for deriving pseudometrics on $X$ which measure the behavioral distance of states. A crucial step is the lifting of the functor $H$ on $\mathrm{Set}$ to a functor $\overline{H}$ on the category $\mathrm{PMet}$ of pseudometric spaces. We present two different approaches which can be viewed as generalizations of the Kantorovich and Wasserstein pseudometrics for probability measures. We show that the pseudometrics provided by the two approaches coincide on several natural examples, but in general they differ. If $H$ has a final coalgebra, every lifting $\overline{H}$ yields in a canonical way a behavioral distance which is usually branching-time, i.e., it generalizes bisimilarity. In order to model linear-time metrics (generalizing trace equivalences), we show sufficient conditions for lifting distributive laws and monads. These results enable us to employ the generalized powerset construction.
5. Codensity Lifting of Monads and its Dual
We introduce a method to lift monads on the base category of a fibration to its total category. This method, which we call codensity lifting, is applicable to various fibrations which were not supported by its precursor, categorical TT-lifting. After introducing the codensity lifting, we illustrate some examples of codensity liftings of monads along the fibrations from the category of preorders, topological spaces and extended pseudometric spaces to the category of sets, and also the fibration from the category of binary relations between measurable spaces. We also introduce the dual method called density lifting of comonads. We next study the liftings of algebraic operations to the codensity liftings of monads. We also give a characterisation of the class of liftings of monads along posetal fibrations with fibred small meets as a limit of a certain large diagram.
6. Extending set functors to generalised metric spaces
For a commutative quantale $\mathcal{V}$, the category $\mathcal{V}-cat$ can be perceived as a category of generalised metric spaces and non-expanding maps. We show that any type constructor $T$ (formalised as an endofunctor on sets) can be extended in a canonical way to a type constructor $T_{\mathcal{V}}$ on $\mathcal{V}-cat$. The proof yields methods of explicitly calculating the extension in concrete examples, which cover well-known notions such as the Pompeiu-Hausdorff metric as well as new ones. Conceptually, this allows us to to solve the same recursive domain equation $X\cong TX$ in different categories (such as sets and metric spaces) and we study how their solutions (that is, the final coalgebras) are related via change of base. Mathematically, the heart of the matter is to show that, for any commutative quantale $\mathcal{V}$, the `discrete' functor $D:\mathsf{Set}\to \mathcal{V}-cat$ from sets to categories enriched over $\mathcal{V}$ is $\mathcal{V}-cat$-dense and has a density presentation that allows us to compute left-Kan extensions along $D$.