Roberto Di Cosmo

Interview

• "Great expectations for free sofware" (Paris, 21/01/98)

Biography

Born in Parma in 1963, Roberto di Cosmo (http://www.dmi.ens.fr/~dicosmo) graduated in information technology from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa where he also obtained his doctorate. He has been associate professor of information technology at the Ecole Supérieur Normale in Paris since 1993.

He is actively involved in research in theoretical computing, specifically in functional programming, parallel and distributed programming, the semantics of programming languages, isomorphisms of types and linear logic. He follows the evolution of aspects of the sociology of IT in today’s society with great interest and, since 1998, has contributed with books, seminars and articles to renewing the links between universities and the means of communication.

Bibliography

His publications include:

• Isomorphisms of types: from lambda-calculus to information retrieval and language design Birkhauser

Among his most recent publications:

• Roberto Di Cosmo. A brief history of rewriting with extensionality, in Fairouz Kamareddine, editor, International Summer School on Type Theory and Rewriting, Glasgow, September 1996. Kluwer (a set of slides on the subject is available as ftp://ftp.ens.fr/pub/dmi/users/dicosmo/Slides/GLA96.ps.gz).
• Pierre-Louis Curien and Roberto Di Cosmo. A confluent reduction system for the lambda-calculus with surjective pairing and terminal object. Journal of Functional Programming, 6(2):299-327, 1996.
• Roberto Di Cosmo and Delia Kesner. Combining algebraic rewriting, extensional lambda calculi and fixpoints. Theoretical Computer Science, 169(2):201-220, 1996.
• Roberto Di Cosmo. Second order isomorphic types. A proof theoretic study on second order lambda-calculus with surjective pairing and terminal object. Information and Computation, pages 176-201, June 1995
• Maria-Virginia Aponte, Roberto Di Cosmo, and Catherine Dubois. Signature subtyping modulo type isomorphisms. In publication, 1997.
• Vincent Danos and Roberto Di Cosmo. The Linear Logic Primer. 1997. In preparation (a preliminary version is available at http://www.dmi.ens.fr/ dicosmo).
• Roberto Di Cosmo, Jean-Vincent Loddo, and Stéphane Nicolet. A game semantics foundation for logic programming. In publication.
• Roberto Di Cosmo. Piège dans le Cyberespace. Multimédium, 17 March 1998 (available on-line at http://www.mmedium.com/dossiers/piege).