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Never underestimate the ability of computer technology corporations to facilitate the mass murder of populations. When will come the time to disrupt the global Internet, before things get seriously out of hand and we will regret the consequences of not acting? We need a back-up plan: how can our populations still manage their daily lives, and our businesses and governments still operate, even when the Internet is massively unavailable?

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Great event organized by National Academy of Sciences and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), regarding AI and the (auto)formalization of mathematics. AI in mathematics is moving forward at an incredibly high speed. Mathematics really is the proving ground for AI, where rigorous and disciplined reasoning matters as much as in life-or-death decisions.

In the last couple of days I got myself convinced that AI can help with (auto)formalizing mathematics and even mathematical discovery. To prevent non-sense, the generative AI needs to be coupled with a very strict gating function: a theorem prover. With the help of Claude, I generated the completeness proof of separation logic in Lean. This was done in only a couple of days, while that same proof effort took me many years during the PhD. It even showed me a direct proof of a novel and really elegant Lindenbaum construction involving the general @-connective, going beyond what I was able to find myself, and I got an incredibly deep insight in the nature of pointer structures. Heck, it even discovered a new axiomatization for arithmetic itself, that uses separation logic and only the binary successor and less-than relations! (Blog post will come out soon.)

Thanks to Patrick Shafto, Terence Tao, Axiom Math, and many others for this event. https://www.nationalacademies.org/units/DEPS-BMSA-22-P-451/event/46979?status=attended&session=4253994&eventID=364145&ID=71240453

nationalacademies.org Organizing Mathematical Knowledge in the Age of AI and Formalization Recent advances in AI-assisted mathematics and formalization are rapidly changing how mathematical knowledge is created, organized, and validated. As these capabilities mature, they raise broader questions about the future of mathematical knowledge as a form of shared infrastructure—not only for mathematics itself, but also for science, engineering, and other high-assurance domains that depend on reliable reasoning. This meeting will bring together experts from the mathematics, formalization, and AI communities as well as leaders in industry, government, philanthropy, and more. Discussions will focus on questions of infrastructure, incentives, and coordination, as well as the role that different sectors can play in shaping the future of the field.

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https://lnkd.in/epQxbDBY

VVBAD Bibliotheken aan de basis van een publiek Europees internet Essay: Bibliotheken aan de basis van een publiek Europees internet

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This week, the paper “The Critical State of Cyberspace” appeared as a chapter in “Advances in Anti-Access and Area Denial (A2/AD): From Defensive Technologies to A Whole-of-Society Approach” (Netherlands Annual Review of Military Studies, #NLARMS 2026), published by Leiden University Press.

The paper is open-access via LUP: the-critical-state-of-cyberspace.pdf

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“MOSCOW, May 5 (Reuters) - Russia cut off mobile internet services to many customers in Moscow on Tuesday ahead of the annual May 9 parade commemorating victory over Nazi Germany, which has been scaled back due to the threat of drone attacks from Ukraine.”

https://lnkd.in/dtZBn5ci

reuters.com Russia limits mobile internet ahead of scaled-back WW2 victory parade Russia cut off mobile internet services to many customers in Moscow ahead of the annual May 9 parade, which has been scaled back because of the threat of drone attacks from Ukraine.

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Great video explaining the “Right to repair” from a U.S. perspective, balancing stakes between government and industry:

https://lnkd.in/eXjMQwP8

YouTube What is the "Right to Repair?" | All About the Base This episode of All About the Base, a video series analyzing critical industrial base topics, analyzes the debate around the "Right to Repair" or whether the…

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Extremely impressed by AI’s ability to generate SVG images, where I as a human am issuing commands and refine the picture step-by-step to match what I had in mind!

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In this opinion piece (in Dutch), David Oldenhof-Boks and yours truly argue that libraries are decentralised information centres where people can meet locally to exchange information and contact the government, even in dire times.

To ensure people are secured in their right to Internet connectivity, we argue that a public secondary ‘back up’ network is needed:

• infrastructure that is completely separated/independent from the current commercialised Internet,
• as energy efficient as possible to sustain electricity blackouts for the longest time,
• fully decentralised and local-first where libraries are essential hubs,
• that must remain available in times of distress, for example when the Internet becomes massively unavailable and we are in the dark.

However, during peace time, this infrastructure can be used to give us a public network with alternatives for BigTech, such as DeltaChat, Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, and many more free and open source apps that can be deployed on top, as envisioned by the Waag Futurelab.

And of course the technology that supports this secondary mission-critical network, that is designed to survive Internet fallouts, is the #SCION technology. A big thank you to SCION Association for maintaining the free and open source implementation of this disruptive core networking technology!

See article (in Dutch):
https://lnkd.in/ezYFB9B2

volkskrant.nl Opinie: In tijden van nood is de bibliotheek jouw reddingsplek Hans-Dieter Hiep en David Oldenhof-Boks betogen dat bibliotheken gedecentraliseerde informatiecentra zijn, en dat er een publiek reservenetwerk nodig is voor wanneer het internet wegvalt.

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What does a leak of 3.5B WhatsApp accounts show? The risks of centralization can no longer be denied: “likely the largest data leak of all time.”

About 1B profile pictures with a human face: a great source that could be used by your favorite adversary, linking face to phone number and vice versa.

https://lnkd.in/eZNzXCtH

heise online 3.5 Billion Accounts: Complete WhatsApp Directory Retrieved and Evaluated Vienna researchers retrieved all WhatsApp numbers. The 3.5 billion profiles represent the largest data leak in history—and it

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“All Your Brains Are Belong To Us” — The future hacker does not merely take control over your computer, (s)he takes control over your brain!

It is time we take back control over our vital networks, before it is too late. We need decentralized networks, with democratic governing structures, built on a secure and verified backbone, to restore trust and peace of mind.

https://lnkd.in/gTqxrEfN

nytimes.com Big Tech Wants Direct Access to Our Brains As neural implant technology and A.I. advance at breakneck speeds, do we need a new set of rights to protect our most intimate data — our minds?

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Interesting but concerning rise in cognitive disability among younger people—the digital natives, the “next generation” that grew up with the Internet as we know it today.

Sometimes I wonder: who is responsible for possibly detrimental effects on mass populations caused by the Internet experiment, and what do we need to do when the whole system spirals out of control?

(We are now only at the start: in the future we will hook up all our brains!)

https://lnkd.in/estsEzMF

neurology.org Trends in the Prevalence of Cognitive Disability Among US Adults A study in Neurology, the figure from which accompanies this message: the prevalence of cognitive disability rises sharply among adults aged 18 to 39 while remaining flat in every older group.

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I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Technology assessor / project manager at NLnet foundation!

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Sometimes it takes only one incorrect pointer dereference to crash the world.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-0x50--page-fault-in-nonpaged-area

learn.microsoft.com Bug Check 0x50 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA - Windows drivers The PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA bug check has a value of 0x00000050. This indicates that invalid system memory has been referenced.

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I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS)!

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https://lnkd.in/e-x-J5h3

In this blog post, Frank S. de Boer and I write about the proof system that I first introduced in my PhD thesis. We introduce the proof system, show a number of examples, argue why it exceeds all current proof systems in capability, and discuss issues in separation logic such as referential transparency, univalence, well-foundedness and finiteness.

(Part of a series: next blog post is about relative completeness of this system.)

dr. heap A sound and complete proof system for separation logic (part 1) – dr. heap A novel proof system for separation logic is explained.

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https://lnkd.in/d34pWWHm

This blog post (20 minutes read) shows that program correctness is a difficult subject. We will see that sometimes it is ‘easy to ask’ but ‘difficult to deliver’. The entire blog post is summarized by these two slogans:

1. To show a program is correct, requires one to find an invariant. To show there is no correct program, also requires one to find an invariant.

2. Correctness is impossible to attain if the requirements are inconsistent.

Extensive analysis of a problem is required to obtain (1) a formal description of the problem, and (2) proof that the requirements are consistent. Even before one starts writing a program, one already has to face a difficult problem: namely, to check that the requirements are consistent! This blog post shows a concrete example that consistency is not always the case—even when the problem looks simple. If we then have requirements that are satisfiable, we then face the second difficult problem: does there exist a correct program at all? The blog post also shows that, no, this is not obvious either. To show that a non-trivial program (i.e. involving a loop) is correct, we face a difficult problem: it requires us to come up with an invariant. On the other hand, to show that there does not exist a correct program at all, we also need to formulate an invariant that any program preserves but which the final required state violates.

Enjoy!

dr. heap On invariance and inconsistency – dr. heap Program correctness is not easy: the requirements of a program may be inconsistent, or there may not even exist a correct program that satisfies the requirements. This article works out two concrete cases.

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ICTAC 2024 - FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
21st International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing
25-29 November 2024, Bangkok - Thailand
https://lnkd.in/e9Cxy5SX

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract submission deadline:
14 June 2024 (AoE)
Paper submission deadline:
21 June 2024 (AoE)
Notification:
1 September 2024 (AoE)
Camera ready:
13 September 2024 (AoE)

SCOPE

The ICTAC conference series aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to present research and exchange ideas and experiences within theoretical aspects of computing through methods and tools for system development. ICTAC also aims to promote research cooperation between developing and industrial countries.

TOPICS

The conference concerns all aspects of theoretical computer science, including, but not limited to:

• Formal languages and automata
• Semantics of programming languages
• Logic in computer science
• Lambda calculus, type theory, and category theory
• Domain-specific languages
• Theories of concurrency and mobility
• Theories of distributed computing
• Models of objects and components
• Coordination models
• Timed, hybrid, embedded, and cyber-physical systems
• Security and privacy
• Static analysis
• Software verification
• Software testing
• Program generation and transformation
• Model checking and theorem proving
• Theoretical aspects of quantum computing
• Theory and methods of trustworthy AI
• Applications and experiences

SUBMISSIONS

We solicit submissions, related to the topics of ICTAC, in the following categories:

• Full papers describing original research contributions;
• Short papers describing original work in progress, new ideas, and emerging challenges; and
• Tool papers describing tools supporting formal techniques for software modeling, system design, and verification.

Full paper submissions must not exceed 16 pages (excluding a bibliography of a maximum of 2 pages). Short and tool papers should not exceed 8 pages.

Submissions must not have been published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be judged based on originality, contribution to the field, technical and presentation quality, and relevance to the conference’s topics.

All contributions to ICTAC 2024 have to be submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair:

https://lnkd.in/e-WQZMMj

PUBLICATION

All accepted papers in the above categories will appear in the proceedings of the conference that will be published as a volume in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference. Their authors must be prepared to sign a copyright transfer statement. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference by the early registration deadline, and present the paper.

We plan to have a special issue for selected accepted papers from ICTAC 2024.

https://lnkd.in/e7m8xyCi

ictac2024.cs.ait.ac.th ICTAC 2024 The 21st International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, 25–29 November 2024, Bangkok, Thailand. The site no longer answers.

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In this blog post, I review a recent preprint article by Mirkowska and Salwicki that claims to have proven the Collatz conjecture—also known as the (3x + 1) problem. Often the Collatz conjecture is used in class as an example for students to see that reasoning about programs can easily become very difficult, since proving the correctness of a very simple program would amount to showing that the Collatz conjecture is true—a more than 80 year old open problem in mathematics.

The authors Mirkowska and Salwicki make use of the tools of algorithmic logic, a field that is closely related to my field of expertise: Hoare’s logic and dynamic logic. In the blog post, I present what I could distill from Mirkowska and Salwicki’s preprint article, and why I am skeptical that they have actually given a proof of the Collatz conjecture.

https://www.drheap.org/articles/2023/can-the-collatz-conjecture-be-proven-or-not/

Keywords: Presburger arithmetic, non-standard interpretations, partial and total correctness, and variants and invariants.

dr. heap Can the Collatz conjecture be proven, or not? – dr. heap We review a recent preprint article about the Collatz conjecture. The Collatz conjecture is a more than eighty years old problem that is still unsolved.

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Our article in the journal Formal Methods in System Design is now openly available on-line: it describes how to integrate and use Algebraic/Abstract Data Types (ADTs) in the KeY theorem prover, useful for reasoning about the correctness of clients of Java interfaces such as java.util.Collection and its Iterator.

(Joint work with: Jinting Bian, Frank de Boer, Stijn de Gouw.)

Our main insight is to keep a history for each instance of an interface, which can then be used in the specification of method contracts (using the design-by-contract methodology). In our approach, histories are modeled by ADTs, both as algebraic data type ánd abstract data type. A history does not predict the future state of an object, but it does allow for the expression of expectations and acceptable behavior. This is important in the verification of real-world software, to make sure no unexpected behavior such as errors and crashes occur.

https://rdcu.be/dbMdO

#software #java #formalverification #theory

rdcu.be Integrating ADTs in KeY and their application to history-based reasoning about collection Jinting Bian, Hans-Dieter A. Hiep, Frank S. de Boer and Stijn de Gouw, in Formal Methods in System Design. DOI 10.1007/s10703-023-00426-x.