React

Robust Theories for Emerging Applications in Concurrency Theory

The REACT Project, funded in part by the Colciencias (The Colombian Agency for Science and Technology Development), brings together two French partners - IRCAM and the LIX laboratory at the École Polytechnique - and several Columbian universities. The objective is to explore, at a basic and practical level, how recent developments in concurrent constraint programming (ccp) can be applied to three areas: security protocols, biological systems, and multimedia semantic interaction (IRCAM's contribution).

Process calculi such as concurrent constraint programming or the pi-calculus were originally designed to describe and reason about concurrent systems. Concurrent constraint programming has been used at IRCAM in modeling different musical processes, such as interaction, the massive calculations for musical constraints, or improvisation.

In all these applications, process calculi are used for at least two reasons. Firstly, since these calculi have careful, mathematical definitions, they can be used to provide careful and high-level meaning to the applications specified using them. Secondly, it can be argued that these calculi have developed rich reasoning methods to reason about meaning and properties of processes. For music, this signifies that a complicated system with musical rules (constraints) could be formally valid in order to determine if it properly models the problem before beginning a calculus.

Despite the broad range of applications, there is a surprising resemblance among them in the kind of analyses that are carried out in each domain. For example, in the field of security, it is often necessary to study the possible configurations - if it is possible to reach a state where one can be attacked in secret then the protocol does not work correctly. In musical modeling, we are interested in similar questions such as, "Has the musical process reached a state where the voices form a cannon while preserving the given harmony?"

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