Hans van Ditmarsch was posted at ReLaX from January to June 2018. During that period, Hans gave a graduate course in Dynamic Epistemic Logic (for the joint interest of students of CMI and of IMSc) in February and March. He also gave several seminar talks at IMSc, two of which were part of the regular seminar series on logic and theoretical computer science: one on asynchronous announcements, and one on knowledge games and uncertainty in voting. Another presentation was given on the occasion of the IMSc Institute Day (16 April 2018). Throughout his stay he interacted on research topics in the area of distributed computing and asynchrony with his host R. Ramanujam. He additionally gave a seminar at CMI on gossip protocols, and interacted with S.P. Suresh (CMI) on such and on other matters.
Work conducted during and after his stay with Vaishnavi Sundararajan and S.P. Suresh resulted in a paper (Who holds the best card? Secure communication of optimal secret bits), currently under submission with a journal. This work was presented by Hans and Vaishnavi at the MAFTEC workshop (Rennes, December 2018). Vaishnavi joined IRISA, Rennes, as a post-doctoral fellow in November 2018).
During his visit, Hans made short trips within India for the purpose of giving invited presentations, interacting with PhD students, and to consider shared research projects, see below.
- 31 January: keynote lecture at ICAMTCS 2018, Nagercoil. ICAMTCS is an annual computer science conference, held at St. Xavier’s Catholic College of Engineering in 2018.
- 8 March: keynote lecture, ISI (Indian Statistical Institute) Kolkata.
- 9 March : invited seminar, Cognitive Science Dept., Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
- 8 May : invited seminar, IIT Kanpur, combined with a research visit to Sunil Simon. Sunil will visit Hans in Nancy in 2019, and they will work on epistemic versions of boolean games.
- 14 May : invited seminar, IIT Mandi, at the end of a 2-week visit which involved research with Deepak Khemani, interactions with students and presiding in a jury on second-year honors students projects in software engineering (featuring autonomous skateboards, surface oil cleaning devices, and apothecary-registered medicine-dispense cabinets for rural areas).
Another outcome of Hans’s stay at ReLaX is his application for a major research grant involving R. Ramanujam (IMSc), Sunil Simon (IIT Kanpur) and Astrid Kiehn (IIT Mandi), as well as other, non-Indian affiliated partners. The goal of this project application is the further investigation of the themes initiated at ReLaX : relations between dynamic epistemic logic and distributed computing, principally, asynchrony and concurrency.