Programme of colloquia for the Autumn 2001 semester

25 September 2001: Prof. Roland Vollmar, Department of Computer Science, University of Karlsruhe,; The Study Centre for Blind and Visually Impaired Students at the University of Karlsruhe; Abstract: For people with special needs, information technology presents some new challenges but also offers a wide range of support options. Efforts to provide such support will be discussed using the example of blind and visually impaired students at a technically oriented university. The main aim is to enable participation in ‘normal’ daily, academic and professional life. Particular attention must be paid to access to different types of information. Computers connected to the World Wide Web have opened up a new world, but new trends in multimedia will bring new challenges. The presentation will focus on the experiences at our Study Centre to allow a comparison with the ‘Support Centre for Blind and Visually Impaired Students’ at Masaryk University.
2 October 2001: Doc. Jan Staudek, CSc, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno; Public Key Infrastructure (PKI); Abstract: The rationale for implementing PKI; the role of PKI within an organisation’s IT infrastructure; fundamental IT security principles relating to PKI; PKI architectures and operating principles; and certificate lifecycle processes. Overview of the current state of standardisation. PKI-based applications. Problems with the implementation and roll-out of PKI. Overview of available products and services provided.
9 October 2001: Dr Richard Mayr, University of Freiburg, Germany; Automata-theoretic models for recursive procedures with parameters
16 October 2001: Dr Michal Winczer, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, Comenius University in Bratislava; International programming competitions — the background to the successes of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science teams; Abstract: Teams from Comenius University, comprising students from the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science, have taken part in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contests for nearly ten years. Our teams have reached the world finals seven times. In this talk, I shall attempt to analyse the background to our success and also to answer the following questions:
** How is our success linked to secondary school programming competitions: the Mathematical Olympiad – Category P, the Correspondent Seminar in Programming, and other secondary school activities?
** Can we expect our success to continue, or not?
** How successful are our students today who were so successful in the above competitions?
In addition, I will discuss how the ACM programming contests are organised and what impact this has on the choice of strategies adopted by successful contestants.
23 October 2001: Dr Michael Nolle, Austria Research Centre Seibersdorf; Distributed image search; Abstract: Content-based retrieval enables information to be found by searching based on its content rather than on attributes such as keywords. Drawing on the current state of the art in content-based image and video retrieval, this talk addresses the problem in distributed environments featuring large, heterogeneous and dynamically changing data repositories. In addition to the motivation, it describes a suitable system architecture and outlines a potentially automated and generic retrieval approach based on invariants. A surveillance system will be used as a realistic testbed for a real-world application scenario.
30 October 2001: Prof. Milos Dokulil, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno; On the exponential development of our civilisation; Abstract: In an era that did not realise it would come to be known as the ‘Middle Ages’, people in Europe generally lived without a personal identity or literacy, and with a low level of predominantly agricultural production. The world itself was perceived as static until the mid-19th century. Even at the turn of the 20th century, servants constituted the second-largest social class. It was not until the Second World War that women entered the workforce on a mass scale. Soon afterwards, the colonial system began to collapse. Individual, increasingly specialised sciences developed in an ever more dramatic and multifaceted manner. By the end of the 20th century, the peasantry had disappeared as a social class in developed countries, and the status of the family ceased to be outwardly stable. Economic integration and globalisation are on the rise. In many sectors, production has moved on from earlier mechanisation to computer-controlled processes.
A long, yet ever-steeper journey from horses, steam, electricity and the landline telephone to jet aircraft, nuclear energy and mobile phones; or indeed to the laser as a medium for information, to the internet, and to bio- and nanotechnologies. Anyone born after 1970 cannot, from personal experience, gauge the steepness of the exponential curve that models the development outlined above.
6 November 2001: Doc. Libor Polak, CSc, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno; Syntactic semiring – classification of regular languages, equations in languages; Abstract: Eilenberg’s correspondence between so-called varieties of regular languages and pseudovarieties of monoids provides a transparent backdrop for Schuetzenberger’s characterisation of star-free languages, Simon’s characterisation of piecewise testable languages, and similar theorems mapping properties of languages onto properties of corresponding syntactic monoids. Recently, the author introduced the so-called syntactic semiring of a language. This is finite precisely when the language in question is regular. We shall present and document examples of Eilenberg-type theorems for so-called conjunctive varieties of languages and pseudovarieties of idempotent semirings. The syntactic semiring is also a suitable tool for solving equations in languages of the form $r(x_1,\\dots, x_m) = L$, where $L$ is a given regular language and $r$ is a regular expression over the finite alphabet $A$ in variables $x_1, \dots, x_m$. In particular, we are able to determine solvability and describe all maximal solutions. We shall also discuss an algorithm for constructing the syntactic semiring of a given regular language.
13 November 2001: Doc. Alexander Meduna, CSc, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Brno University of Technology; Parallel Grammars; Abstract: Unlike sequential grammars, parallel grammars rewriting a sequence of symbols* of a sentence form during a single derivation step. They can be divided into two basic groups. The first group comprises fully parallel grammars, such as L-systems, which rewrite all symbols of a sentence form in a single derivation step. The second group comprises partially parallel grammars, such as scattered context grammars or multigrammars, which simultaneously re-write only a few symbols whilst leaving the remaining symbols of the sentence form unre-written. Although the seminar will provide an overview of grammars from both groups, it will focus primarily on grammars from the second group. It will focus in particular on a discussion of their descriptional complexity, as this is currently an area of intensive research in the theory of formal languages.
20 November 2001: Prof. Jana Zvarová, DrSc, UI CAV, Prague; Medical Informatics; Abstract: Medicine has traditionally been concerned with the study of health and disease, the causes and consequences of diseases, and their diagnosis, treatment and prevention. Medical informatics derives its legitimate raison d’être from the fact that it achieves new practical results applicable in medicine and healthcare. In addition to being a typical applied science, medical informatics has already developed a number of new theoretical approaches for solving medical problems, thereby contributing to the advancement of scientific knowledge in medicine. This fact is clearly evident in the specialist articles published in the IMIA Yearbooks, which are published annually by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA). Research and development in the field of medical informatics is very extensive. We shall focus in more detail on research and development relating to electronic health records, electronic medical recommendations and decision support systems. The current state of legislation governing the provision of healthcare defines, to a certain extent, the content, form and access rights relating to the use of a citizen’s health records. In the Czech Republic, there is only a limited number of subordinate legislation, regulations, interfaces and other standards governing the establishment and operation of healthcare information systems designed to safeguard medical records in electronic form. Research and development of healthcare information and knowledge systems, including those relating to human resources, forms part of the emerging information society in healthcare, which is bringing about a number of changes. For many people, easier access to information sources is gradually becoming available, particularly via the Internet. This naturally also applies to information sources concerning their health and other information on illnesses, food, lifestyle, medicines and healthcare systems. In the future, it is expected that it will be possible to consult various experts via teleconsultations in cases of urgent need, and that patients will always carry their own electronic health records with them. The Internet/Web, together with intranet networks, offers an open and global framework for collaboration. Consideration is being given to the operation of healthcare information systems directly from healthcare facilities or other institutions, to the provision of information on disease prevention and treatment, to medical consultations and to the remote selection of a doctor. Clinical staff are gradually gaining access to an immense number of international databases and knowledge bases, which can be used for further training or as virtual electronic libraries. They thus have easy access to medical guidelines and protocols, evidence-based medical practice and research findings. Interdisciplinary research and development in medical informatics also focuses on the intelligent utilisation of data and knowledge stored in healthcare information and knowledge systems, and on the development of new technologies in the fields of telemetry and telemedicine. Its main objective is to improve the quality and efficiency of diagnostic and therapeutic processes and prevention, to introduce new approaches to utilising medical knowledge from medical publications, to interpret data and knowledge effectively, and to facilitate the rapid retrieval of information sources.
27 November 2001: Dr Barbara Koenig, TU Munich; Analysing graph transformation systems; Abstract: Graph transformation systems provide intuitive ways to model concurrent systems, such as dynamic networks, interacting processes and mobile systems. However, the development of analysis and verification techniques for graph transformation systems is still in its early stages.
This talk presents one possible analysis technique based on the so-called unfolding approach for Petri nets. From a Petri net, one can derive a (usually infinite) structure that represents all possible computations of a Petri net. This method can also be applied to graph transformation systems. In order to develop an analysis technique, it is possible to over-approximate this infinite unfolding with a finite structure.
This talk introduces graph transformation systems and the unfolding technique. It further presents an algorithm that computes the so-called approximated unfolding and demonstrates how it can be used to analyse concurrent systems specified by graph transformation rules.
A simple example will be used to demonstrate how to model a network of mobile processes, in which our method can detect potential security breaches.
4 December 2001: Doc. Karel Oliva, CSc; Formal aspects of word order in natural languages; Abstract: In the first part of the lecture, we shall define the concept of the degree of free word order and then compare the empirical properties of Czech and English (and, to a lesser extent, other languages) from this perspective. We shall thus demonstrate that the traditional linguistic (intuitive) observation—that English has a more fixed word order than Czech—can be placed on a formal footing; that it is possible to define a whole scale of degrees of free word order; and that the freedom of word order can indeed be measured precisely (at least in the sense of the defined measure).
In the second part of the lecture, we shall focus on the results that can be obtained using this measure in the field of asymptotic complexity of natural language sentence analysis (parsing). We shall show that, precisely because of the higher degree of free word order, the analysis of Czech is necessarily more time-complex (exponentially) than the analysis of English (for which polynomial-time algorithms can be found).
11 December 2001: Prof. Jiri Jan, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Brno University of Technology, Brno; TBA
18 December 2001: Prof. J. Koca, DrSc, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno; Current trends and challenges in computer modelling and simulation of molecules; Abstract: What physics and classical chemistry have known for some time is now being experienced by biomolecular chemistry – computer modelling and simulation are becoming an integral part of research in this field. The colloquium will cover several areas: the first will focus on discussing what information computer modelling and simulation in the field of biomolecules can provide and what we can expect in terms of the quality of this information. The second part will outline the basic methods for calculating energy, which is a key phenomenon in computational modelling and simulation.
The third part will be devoted to the most important and most advanced computational method of the present day – molecular dynamics, which enables the study of the three-dimensional structure of molecules as a function of time.
The fourth part will use examples to illustrate several cases where computer modelling and simulation provide information that is difficult or impossible to obtain experimentally.
The concluding chapter will discuss in greater detail the points mentioned or alluded to in each of the preceding sections. These will be key problems (both physical and algorithmic in nature) that are directly related to the computational implementation of the methods mentioned above, and which are therefore, by their very nature, of a computational nature.