Logic faculty members

William Aspray

Mehmet M. Dalkilic

J. Michael Dunn

University Dean of the School of Informatics; Professor ofInformatics;Professor of Computer Science; Oscar Ewing Professor of Philosophy; Core Faculty in Cognitive Science. Dunn's research focuses on information based logics and relations between logic and computer science. He is particularly interested in the so-called "sub-structural logics" including intuitionistic logic, relevance logic, linear logic, BCK-logic, and the Lambek Calculus. He has developed an algebraic approach to these and many other logics under the heading of "gaggle theory" (for generalized galois logics), which is contained in a series of papers and in Dunn's book (with Gary Hardegree) Algebraic Methods in Philosophical Logic (Oxford University Press, 2001). He has recently been applying these ideas to model relation algebras, with R.K. Meyer to model combinatory logic, and with K. Bimbo to model Kleene *-algebras and Pratt's dynamic logic. He is also interested in quantum logic and quantum computation. Dunn is North American Editor of the Bulletin of the Section on Logic of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and has been an editor of The Journal of Symbolic Logic and the Journal of Philosophical Logic.

Daniel P. Friedman

Professor of Computer Science. Friedman's primary interests lie in the study of programming languages. He finds all facets of them interesting, but focuses mainly on their formal properties. His recent interest has been in the study of the reflective properties of languages, monadic effects, abstract interpretation, partial evaluation, semantics in general, and the lambda calculus and denotational semantics in particular. He has interests in object-oriented programming, especially pertaining to the use of the meta-object protocols, the use of first-class continuations, understanding exception-handling and modularity. Friedman is a long time advocate of languages like LISP or Scheme, where freedom of expression is highly valued.

Esfandiar Haghverdi

Steven D. Johnson

Professor of Computer Science.  Johnson's research is in formal methods for system design.  He uses algebraic methods to model and reason about reactive and embedded systems.  A research tool developed to explore these applications is DDD (Digital Design Derivation), an interactive transformation system.  DDD is used in conjunction with other kinds of reasoning tools to create a environment for rigorous design and implementation.  Johnson has investigated diagrammatic reasoning applications in hardware design, and is involved with an international initiative developing curricula and pedagogy for formal methods education.

Sun Kim

Daniel Leivant

Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Professor of Mathematics and of Philosophy. Leivant's work is mostly on the logical foundations of computing theory and of constructive mathematics. Much of his more recent research has been on relations between logic and computational complexity, including computational complexity for functions of higher type. He also has ongoing interests in formal reasoning about programs, program derivation and transformation, software specification, modal logics, proof theory, and foundational aspects of mathematical logic.

David Charles McCarty

Michael A. McRobbie

Vice President for Information Technology, Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Philosophy, Adjunct Professor of Information Science, Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Technology, IUPUI. McRobbie's major research interests include artificial intelligence especially automated deduction, proof theory and various areas in high performance computing and communications, especially parallel symbolic computation. Much of his recent career has been spent in the establishment of advanced computing and communications infrastructure in such areas as parallel computing, virtual reality and high speed network testbeds, both nationally and globally.

Joseph Miller

Miller received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Cornell University in August of 2002 under the direction of Anil Nerode. He has been a VIGRE Postdoctoral fellow in our Mathematics Department, and he spent one of those years at Victoria University, Wellington. His interests are in computability theory, especially in those areas on the fringes of computability theory where there is nontrivial interaction between computable structure and classical mathematical structure. To this end, he has done work in algorithmic randomness, reverse mathematics, and effective mathematics (primarily computable analysis and topology).

Jonathan Mills

Associate Professor of Computer Science. In 1992 Mills invented Stiquito, a miniature six-legged robot. As of May 1994 over 1600 Stiquitos are in use at more than 500 sites world-wide including CMU, UC Berkeley,  UCLA, Stanford and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Professor Mills and his students are studying the theory, design and VLSI implementation of analog computers. Their current work is focused on analog and hybrid computers described by Lukasiewicz logic. These processors, called Lukasiewicz logic arrays (LLAs), are used to implement computational sensors, neural networks, and fuzzy inference engines. Mills is also collaborating with Professor Rawlins on the Stiquito Colony Project. The project's goal is to c reate a colony of several hundred to 1000 autonomous robots based on Stiquito, and use the colony to study adaptive and emergent behavior, comparing observed behavior to that predicted by simulation. Students interested in this research might develop too ls to synthesize and verify analog computers, apply LLAs as image processors and neural networks, or design, simulate and implement a robot colony to study emergent computation.

Lawrence S. Moss

Director, Program in Pure and Applied Logic. Professor of Mathematics; Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, Informatics, Linguistics and Philosophy, and associated with the Cognitive Science and Computational Linguistics Programs. He is an editor of the Journal of Logic, Language, and Information and is on the editorial board of the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Research on Language and Computation, Grammars, Annals of Mathematics, Computing and Teleinformatics, and Logical Methods in Computer Science. His research is in areas of applied logic, including dynamic epistemic logic, coalgebraic logic and recursion theory, circularity, and mathematics of language. Past areas include abstract recursion theory, generalized quantifiers, feature structure logics and other interactions of logic and linguistics, modal logic, graph theory, evolving algebras, and abstract data types.

Steven Myers

Paul Purdom

Professor Purdom is interested in the time needed to solve Boolean Satisfiability problems. Although the best known algorithms for this problem appear to need time that is exponential in the size of the problem instance, much progress has been made improving the performance of algorithms for this problem. For example, in the early 1990s, the best programs had trouble solving hard random problems with more than 100 variables, but today one can solve such problems with 700 variables. Most of professor Purdom's work has been on determining for particular algorithms which random SAT problems can be solved in polynomial average time and which ones need exponential time.

Professor Purdom has also classified recent entries into SAT competetion based on which problems they could solve within the time limit. Programs with similar performance usually are based on similar ideas.

Edward L. Robertson

Amr Sabry

Associate Professor of Computer Science. Associate Professor of Computer Science. Sabry's research is in the general areas of type theory and the semantics of programming languages and their implementations, with a focus on continuations, monads, and their logical foundations.

Leah Savion

Paul Vincent Spade

Dirk Van Gucht

Associate Professor of Computer Science. Van Gucht's research consists of the design and implementation of database models and database languages that deal with data objects of a complex external and internal organization. Currently, his research focuse s on object-oriented databases and their associated data manipulation operations. Since such databases can be conceptually represented as graphs, he is working with a data model (the so called graph-oriented object data model) wherein the data objects ar e graphs and data manipulation operations are specified as graph transformations. A challenging problem here is to specify procedural to study the foundations of logic and set-theory. Van Gucht has also been interested in genetic algorithms. These adaptive optimization algorithms are applicable to a wide variety of problems such as global function optimization and automatic generation of expert systems. Van Gucht's efforts have concentrated on applying genetic algorithms to the traveling salesman problem and other combinatorial optimization problems.

Xiaofeng Wang

Joan Weiner

William Wheeler

David Wise

Professor of Computer Science. Wise's research interests lie in the field of functional programming languages and algorithms for multiprocessing. The thesis that functional programming is ideal for parallel processing ties these interests to parallel architecture. Because applicative (or functional) languages express only necessary dependencies among values, applicative programs only express sequencing that is truly essential. Wise and his group are using logical techniques in hardware, compilers, and algorithms to enhance the performance of these languages on multiprocessors.

Catharine Wyss