Probability in Computer Science

Date of application: 2024-04-18 (full days 09:00-17:00)
Type of activity: A PhD School
Title: Probability in Computer Science

Organizers / Coordinators:
Prof. Dr. Ir. Joost-Pieter Katoen, PDEng (katoen@cs.rwth-aachen.de)
Prof. Raúl Pardo, IT University of Copenhagen (raup@itu.dk)
Prof. Andrzej Wąsowski (wasowski@itu.dk)

Course Webpage: 
https://etaps.org/about/fopss-schools/2024/

Lecturers / Coordinators:
prof. Alexandra Silva, Cornell University 
prof. Antonio Vergari, University of Edinburgh
prof. Dan Suciu, University of Washington
prof. Joseph Halpern, Cornell
prof. Mikkel Thorup, University of Copenhagen 
prof. Philipp Hennig, University of Tübingen
prof. Ivan Damgård, Aarhus University 
prof. Marta Kwiatkowska, University of Oxford 

Room:
Auditorium 1 (secured)

Course description:
PICS is the 5th school in the series of Foundations of Programming and Software Systems schools, an initiative of ACM SIGLOG, ACM SIGPLAN, the European Association on Theoretical Computer Science, and ETAPS (European Conference on Theory and Practice of Software Systems). PICS is not an ordinary PhD school. It crosses many disciplines, asking speakers from diverse research areas to deliver their favorite battle stories on the use of probability in computer science. We have outstanding lecturers from different areas of computing such as security, reasoning, randomized algorithms, probabilistic databases, semantics, verification, machine learning, and so forth.To increase the long-lasting impact of the event we intend to record the lectures and publish them online after the event.

Program:
The format is daily lectures for about 8 hours with ample breaks and social events to maximize the interaction between the participants and the lecturers. We negotiated with the speakers that most of them will stay at ITU for several days to enable out-of-lecture discussions on the presented material and the ongoing research.

The topics to be be covered:
• The Frontiers of Active Learning in Network Verification (Silva)
• Probabilistic circuits: from tractable probabilistic inference to reliable neuro-symbolic AI (Vergari)
• Information Theory for Relational Query Processing (Suciu)
• University Causality, Explanation, and Harm (Halpern)
• Hashing in Probabilistic Algorithms (Thorup)
• Probabilistic Numerics — Computation as Inference (Hennig)
• On the many crucial roles played by randomness in cryptography (Damgård)
• Probabilistic verification for neural networks (Kwiatkowska).

Prerequisites:
Basic knowledge of probability theory, introductory algebra, and mathematical logic.

Exam Format:
To receive credits a student must physically attend the entire event at ITU, actively participating in the lecture sessions. In addition, the students must make a poster and present it as part of passing the course.

Credits: 2 ECTS
About 30 hours of lectures and the poster session amounts to approximately 2 ECTS points. Number of hours the student is expected to spend on a course: About 30 hours, including a 2h poster session. About 10 hours for poster preparation.

How to sign up:
The registration website is available from https://etaps.org/about/fopss-schools/2024/. Students are accepted by the organizers based on a short motivation statement (a paragraph long statement about their research project). Early registration deadline for signing-up: September 1, 2024. We discourage later registration by raising the registration cost after this date, but we will accept a small number of later registrations if there is space.