Your workload will consist of completing an assigned weekly reading BEFORE class (I am guestimating, it will take about 6 hours a week to do well). You may be also assigned some small exercises, to enhance your understanding of the material. Those are not to be handed in but can be discussed in class. Bring to class questions, comments, suggestion for going over some aspects in more detail, as well as be prepared to step in to explain some material to your fellow classmates.
You are also responsible for leading the discussion during at least one lecture in the semester. In addition, you might be called to present an algorithm or a concept in class (15-20 minutes).
How to choose which week you should lead the discussion? Read the tentative schedule below and choose two topics you are interested in. In any given week, I reserve the right to "volunteer" people at random if noone else agrees to take on this material.
What does "leading the discussion" entail? Suppose you are responsible for the material for week N. During week N-1, skim through the assigned chapter and look for 2-3 automated verification papers (if appropriate) to supplement the theoretical exposition. At the end of the class of week N-1, give a 5-minute summary of the proposed readings, both coming from the textbook and from the papers. Discuss with me the best form of presenting this material.
Whether you are taking the course for credit or just sitting in, leading a discussion is fun and does not actually take all that much work! And, more importantly, I will be after you, so please volunteer!
| Class participation | 50% |
| Discussion leading, "presentation" | 50% |
| Week | Date | Topics | Readings | Leader |
| 0 | Sep. 14 | Introduction, course organization and setup | NONE | Marsha |
| 1 | Sep. 21 | omega-automata | Chapter 1 | Shiva |
| 2 | Sep. 28 | Complementation, Mona. | pp. 61-68 (Chapter 4) and pp. 1 - 21 (except 2.4 (pp. 11-14)) of the paper. Talk on Mona. | Nils Klarlund |
| 3 | Oct. 5 | Infinite Games | Chapter 2. Notes (from Albert Lai) on ordinals and transfinite induction. | Yuan |
| 4 | Oct. 12 | Parity Games | Chapter 6, Chapter 7.5 | Ou |
| 5 | Oct. 19 | Parity Games (Algorithms) | Chapter 7 | Albert |
| 6 | Oct. 26 | Nondeterministic Tree Automata | Chapter 8 | Mihaela |
| 7 | Nov. 2 | No class | ||
| 8 | Nov. 9 | Determinization, Alternating Tree Automata and Parity Games | Safra's paper and Chapter 9 | Arie |
| 10 | Nov. 19 (note new day!) | Modal Mu-Calculus and Alternating Tree Automata | Chapter 10 | Albert |
| 11 | Nov. 23 | Guarded Logics | Chapter 18 and Vardi's paper (robust decidability of monadic logics) | Shiva |
| 12 | Nov. 30 | Prefix-Recognizable Graphs and Monadic Logic | Chapter 15 | Arie |
| 13 | Dec. 7 | Two-Way Tree Automata Solving Pushdown Games | Chapter 17 and Kupferman and Vardi "An Automata-Theoretic Approach to Reasoning about Infinite-State Systems" and Vardi "Reasoning about The Past with Two-Way Automata" (ICALP'98) | Marsha |
| 14 | Dec. 13 (note new day!) | Alternating Temporal Logic | Mocha: Modularity in Model Checking, and Alternating-time Temporal Logic (journal version). Reading notes. | Yuan |