Logic faculty members

Nino B. Cocchiarella

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. His areas of special interest are logic and formal semantics; philosophy of mathematics, language, and science; artificial intelligence and cognitive science; metaphysics and comparative formal ontology; Montague grammar and philosophical linguistics; and Indian philosophy. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Philosophical Logic, Synthese and Indices: Monographs in Philosophical Logic and Formal Linguistics. He has been both an NEH and an NSF fellow.

Mehmet M. Dalkilic

Associate Professor of Informatics. His research includes three areas: data mining, database, and bioinformatics. In data mining, he is interested in novel classification techniques and their effective implementation. In databases, he working on query optimization through the use of entropy and modeling of XML. In bioinformatics he is working on two different kinds of projects. The first is the PFA, an information system for the management of protein family annotations. The second project is in computational genomics, applying the novel classification technique from circuit minimization to better classify orthologous protein families.

Gary Ebbs

Professor of Philosophy. He is interested in a group of interconnected topics in the philosophy of logic, language and mind, including rule-following, meaning, the analytic-synthetic distinction, anti-individualism, realism, skepticism, self-knowledge, and truth. Also interested in the history of analytic philosophy, especially the writings of Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine. Publications include Rule-Following and Realism , "Can We Take Our Words at Face Value?" "The Very Idea of Sameness of Extension Across Time," "Carnap's Logical Syntax," "Learning from Others," and "A Puzzle About Doubt." Currently developing a conception of words that licenses us accept our ordinary, non-deliberative applications of our own Tarski-style disquotational truth predicates to other speakers' sentences, as well as to our own sentences as we used them in the past.

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.

Thomas Grano

Amit Hagar

Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy of Science. He was born and educated in Israel, and received his B.A. (1996) and MA (2000) in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He wrote his M.A. thesis on the hole argument and the ontology of spacetime theories. His Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Chance and Time" (2004) was written in Vancouver in the University of British Columbia and concerns the foundations of statistical physics. It was also published as an expository book on the philosophy of physics in Israel. His main interests span the foundations of modern physics, especially the origin and source of the probabilities one encounters in statistical and quantum mechanics, the philosophy of time, and the notion of physical computation, especially in the context of quantum information theory. He is currently engaged in several projects in those fields.

Esfandiar Haghverdi

Professor of Computer Science. He received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical and electronics engineering and wrote a masters thesis on the verification of finite state programs. Later he got a Ph.D. in mathematics, specializing in mathematical logic and category theory. As it is perhaps evident from this background, his research interests cover a wide spectrum ranging from categorical proof theory to hybrid dynamical systems. Specific interests include the geometry of interaction, ludics, algebraic proof theory, and bisumulation in dynamical, control, and hybrid systems.

Steven D. Johnson

Emeritus 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.

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.

Kirk Ludwig

Professor of Philosophy. He works on foundational issues in the philosophy of language, especially in connection with meaning, truth and logical form in natural language, and in the philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, and metaphysics. He is the editor of the volume on Donald Davidson (2003) in the Cambridge Contemporary Philosophy in Focus series, and he is coauthor with Ernie Lepore (Rutgers) of Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (OUP 2005) and Donald Davidson‘s Truth- theoretic Semantics (OUP 2007). Recent articles include “Logical Form,” in The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language (in press), “Truth and Meaning Redux” (with Ernie Lepore, Philosophical Studies, 2010), “Semantics” (Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, 2010), “Adverbs of Action and Logical Form” (A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley, 2009), “Fodor‘s Challenge to the Classical Computational Theory of Mind” (with Susan Schneider, Mind and Language, 2008), “The Concept of Truth and the Semantics of the Truth Predicate” (with Emil Badici, Inquiry, 2007), “Collective Intentional Behavior from the Standpoint of Semantics” (Noûs, 2007), “Ontology in the Theory of Meaning” (with Ernie Lepore, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2006), “Semantics for Nondeclaratives” (with Daniel Boisvert, Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, 2006), and “Davidson‘s Objection to Horwich‘s Minimalism about Truth” (Journal of Philosophy, 2004).

Michael A. McRobbie

Past President of Indiana Unviersity. Professor of Computer and Professor of Philosophy. 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.

Lawrence S. Moss

Director, IU 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 has served as editor of the Journal of Logic, Language, and Information and the Review of Symbolic Logic, and is on the editorial board of the Logical Methods in Computer Science, and Logic and Logical Philosophy. He served as chair of the Steering Committee of the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information; also, he co-chaired the Adavnces in Modal Logic conference and is co-chair of the conference on Algebra and Coalgebra in Computer Science. His research is in areas of applied logic, including logics for natural language inference, 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.

Paul Purdom

Emeritus Professor of Computer Science. He 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.

Armando Razo

Associate Professor of Economics. Armando Razo researches how informal and formal institutions affect economic behavior in developing countries. His research includes the development of mathematical and computational models to develop theories on the impact of social and political networks on economic outcomes. He also applies statistical network analysis to the study of economic history and international development. He served on the Founding Scientific Leadership Team that helped establish the Indiana University Network Science Institute (http://iuni.iu.edu). His teaching includes courses on Networks and institutions, Quantitative contextual analysis, Political economy of development, Latin American politics, and Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE).

Edward L. Robertson

Emeritus Professor of Computer Science. He served as co-executive director of the Indiana Center for Database Systems from 1990 to 1992. Robertson and his colleagues address the continuing problem of mismatch between information, as images of the real world, and data, as database representations of these images. The traditional solution to this mismatch has been the use of professionals knowledgeable about both environments to span over the mismatch. However, the growth of end-user computing, by eliminating the intervening professionals, makes the mismatch problem much more severe. Therefore Robertson and his colleagues are conceptualizing, designing, and implementing database tools able to represent and to present the real world more meaningfully. But database technology will not by itself solve the mismatch problem, for the data models of the real world will continue to evolve in scope and complexity. Therefore they also continue to explore "significant abstractions" which facilitate the development and representation of data models and the querying and manipulation capabilities within the models.

Amr Sabry

Professor of Informatics and Computing, and Chair, 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

Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Director of Associate Instructor Training. Her specialties include logic, cognitive science, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, epistemology and pedagogical theories. Her other research interests encompass theories of rationality, the psychology of mind and educational psychology. Recent publications include "Rationality, Logic, and Heuristics" (with Raymundo Morado, Conference Proceedings of the Special Session on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, June 2002 Internal Conference on Artificial Intelligence, CSREA Press), "Walls of Misconceptions" (The Successful Professor, Aug. 2002), "Naive Logic" (Iyyun, Jan. 2003), "Enhancing Students' Motivation: Emotive Aspects" (The Successful Professor, Feb. 2003), and "Enhancing Students' Motivation: Cognitive Aspects (The Successful Professor, May 2003).

Chung-chieh Shan

Assistant Professor of Informatics. His interests cover many areas related to programming langauge semantics and pragmatics, including probabilistic programming; and also natural language semantics.

Jeremy Siek

Jeremy Siek is an Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. He is also Director of IU's Center for Programming Systems. Jeremy's areas of research include programming language design, type systems, mechanized theorem proving using proof assistants, and optimizing compilers. Jeremy's Ph.D. thesis explored foundations for constrained templates, aka the "concepts" proposal for C++. Prior to that, Jeremy developed the Boost Graph Library, a C++ generic library for graph algorithms and data structures. Jeremy post-doc'd at Rice University where he developed the idea of gradual typing: a type system that integrates both dynamic and static typing in the same programming language. Jeremy is currently working on a gradually-typed version of Python, a version of concepts for Chapel, and the automatic generation of memory-efficient linear algebra kernels. In 2009 Jeremy received the NSF CAREER award to fund his project: "Bridging the Gap Between Prototyping and Production". In 2010 Jeremy was awarded a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from the Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance.

Paul Vincent Spade

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy. Ph.D., University of Toronto. His main area of research is medieval philosophy, with a particular focus on medieval logic and semantic theory. One of his main interests is medieval approaches to paradoxes like the Liar (what they called "insolubles").

Dirk Van Gucht

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

Associate Professor of Informatics. His research interests span all areas of computer and communication security. In particular, he is carrying out active research on network security, game theoretic incentive engineering, and anonymity systems. He is also interested in the following areas: denial-of-service attacks; incentive engineering in information security; wireless ad-hoc networks; privacy; worm and virus spread, lightweight cryptography; software security; safe exchange; mobile code security; survivable systems; intrusion detection.

Joan Weiner

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy. Her principal interests include history of analytic philosophy (particularly Frege), philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics. Author of Frege in Perspective (Cornell, 1990) and Frege (Oxford University Press, 1999). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the University of London School of Advanced Study. She has also been awarded an NSF grant and a University of Pittsburgh Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship.

William Wheeler

Associate Professor of Mathematics

David Wise

Professor Emeritus 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.