Online mode
IIT Bombay, Powai
The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay is organising an Institute Colloquium on Wednesday, November 4, 2020. The details of the colloquium are given below:
Title: "Time, from Physics to Informatics and Music"
Speaker: Prof. Gérard Berry, Professor and Algorithms, Programs and Machine Chair
YouTube Link: (To broadcast the meet to the general audience):
Webex Details: (For Guests who will be attending the meet):
https://eyantra.webex.com/eyantra/j.php?MTID=m23d0e012c92721d60c547287a9dcb810
Meeting number: 170 053 0756
Password: cdP3ApP37dZ
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Abstract: The nature of time has been extensively discussed by philosophers and physicists, in a mostly inconclusive way. In parallel, its precise and reliable measurement has long been a major practical problem for human activities such as navigation, positioning, and the control of a large number of mechanisms. Thanks to stunning progress in physics, time measurement has turned so precise that the second now serves as the basis for distances and weights. Time in biological systems becomes also widely studied, for instance w.r.t. its role in information processing in cells and the brain. Nevertheless, the everyday spoken language of time remains stunningly imprecise but deliciously poetic. After recalling these facts, we turn to the positive use of time in computer science and music, concentrating on the need to accurately speak and reason about it. Strangely enough, there is no mention of time in classical programming languages such as C or Java. But specific reactive languages such as my own Esterel language have been developed since the 1980’s to better program systems for which dealing with time is essential, with a strong involvement of Indian researchers. Typical examples are the numerous cyber-physical systems where the physical behaviour is controlled by computers and software: airplanes, trains, cars, and may other machines. The talk will explain why Newton’s single t variable is inadequate for such a goal, why one needs to extend the usual notion of time counted in seconds to the arbitrary repetition of multiple asynchronous events, how to program applications based on such multiple times, and how to reason about such programs. Finally, we will show that the same notion of multiple times applies to music, and that the aforementioned programming solutions invented for controlling machines also apply to musical questions such as clever automatic accompaniment and man /machine co-improvisation.
About the speaker: Prof. Gérard Berry, member of the French Académie des sciences and Gold Medal of CNRS in 2014, studied at Ecole Polytechnique and Corps des Mines in Paris. He was researcher at Ecole des Mines and Inria from 1970 to 2001, Chief Scientist of the Esterel Technologies company from 2001 to 2009, Director of Research at Inria from 2009 to 2012, before being appointed as Full Professor at Collège de France in 2012 on the Algorithms, Programs and Machine Chair; he had previously held there two yearly chairs in 2007-2008 and 2009-2010. He officially retired in 2001. His main scientific contributions concern the formal development of programming languages in relation with mathematical logic, parallel and real-time programming, high-level design of computer circuits and systems, and formal verification of programs and circuits. He is the creator of the Esterel synchronous reactive language. Through his courses, books and conferences, he is also active in the dissemination to a general audience of the new algorithmic way of thinking and acting.