The Neuro-symbolic AI Seminar is jointly organized by IMAR, FMI-CS, ILDS, with the support of BRD and IBF.
All seminars, except where otherwise indicated, will be on Thursdays between 10:00 and 12:00, Bucharest time. The seminars are held locally at Hall 203 of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest (in the new PBTower location), but can also be occasionally held remotely.
To receive announcements about the seminar, please send an email to nsai-seminar@ilds.ro.
Organizers: Laurențiu Leuștean, Marius Popescu
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Gheorghe Ștefănescu (University of Bucharest)
Mixed control-flow and data-flow computing models
Abstract:
We start with a brief presentation of the evolution of formalisms for understating brain neuronal activity and the connections with computing machines, particularly with an emphasis on the works of Boole (1854), McCulloch and Pitts (1943), Kleene (1951) et al. Then we go to the technical part of the talk.
Symmetric monoidal category with feedback (a.k.a. traced monoidal category), introduced by Ștefănescu in 1986, is a versatile algebraic structure. Initially, an additive interpretation of the monoidal operation was considered, aiming to model control structures like flowchart schemes or finite automata. Later on, with a multiplicative interpretation of the monoidal operation, the structure was successfully used to capture parallel computing models, in particular data-flow networks.
Classical sequential programs have limited parallelism, while parallel data-flow networks have limited control. Hence, it is desirable to have a setting freely mixing control and parallelism. We propose symmetric semiringal categories (having two monoidal operations: addition and multiplication) with feedback as an algebraic candidate to study this complicated setting. Finally, we present a few partial results (the construction of the free mixalgebra and the related free distributed category; an example showing the formal extraction of parallel components of a cyclic sequential program).