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Publications

Publications by Hugo Pereira Pacheco

2021

Rosy: An elegant language to teach the pure reactive nature of robot programming

Authors
Pacheco, H; Macedo, N;

Publication
International Journal of Robotic Computing

Abstract
Robotics is very appealing and is long recognized as a great way to teach programming, while drawing inspiring connections to other branches of engineering and science such as maths, physics or electronics. Although this symbiotic relationship between robotics and programming is perceived as largely beneficial, educational approaches often feel the need to hide the underlying complexity of the robotic system, but as a result fail to transmit the reactive essence of robot programming to the roboticists and programmers of the future. This paper presents Rosy, a novel language for teaching novice programmers through robotics. Its functional style is both familiar with a high-school algebra background and a materialization of the inherent reactive nature of robotic programming. Working at a higher-level of abstraction also teaches valuable design principles of decomposition of robotics software into collections of interacting controllers. Despite its simplicity, Rosy is completely valid Haskell code compatible with the ROS~ecosystem. We make a convincing case for our language by demonstrating how non-trivial applications can be expressed with ease and clarity, exposing its sound functional programming foundations, and developing a web-enabled robot programming environment.

2023

General-Purpose Secure Conflict-free Replicated Data Types

Authors
Portela, B; Pacheco, H; Jorge, P; Pontes, R;

Publication
2023 IEEE 36TH COMPUTER SECURITY FOUNDATIONS SYMPOSIUM, CSF

Abstract
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are a very popular class of distributed data structures that strike a compromise between strong and eventual consistency. Ensuring the protection of data stored within a CRDT, however, cannot be done trivially using standard encryption techniques, as secure CRDT protocols would require replica-side computation. This paper proposes an approach to lift general-purpose implementations of CRDTs to secure variants using secure multiparty computation (MPC). Each replica within the system is realized by a group of MPC parties that compute its functionality. Our results include: i) an extension of current formal models used for reasoning over the security of CRDT solutions to the MPC setting; ii) a MPC language and type system to enable the construction of secure versions of CRDTs and; iii) a proof of security that relates the security of CRDT constructions designed under said semantics to the underlying MPC library. We provide an open-source system implementation with an extensive evaluation, which compares different designs with their baseline throughput and latency.

2012

Delta Lenses over Inductive Types

Authors
Pacheco, H; Cunha, A; Hu, Z;

Publication
ECEASST

Abstract
Existing bidirectional languages are either state-based or operation-based, depending on whether they represent updates as mere states or as sequences of edit operations. In-between both worlds are delta-based frameworks, where updates are represented using alignment relationships between states. In this paper, we formalize delta lenses over inductive types using dependent type theory and develop a point-free delta lens language with an explicit separation of shape and data. In contrast with the already known issue of data alignment, we identify the new problem of shape alignment and solve it by lifting standard recursion patterns such as folds and unfolds to delta lenses that use alignment to infer meaningful shape updates. © Bidirectional Transformations 2012.

2012

Relations as Executable Specifications: Taming Partiality and Non-determinism Using Invariants

Authors
Macedo, N; Pacheco, H; Cunha, A;

Publication
Relational and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science - 13th International Conference, RAMiCS 2012, Cambridge, UK, September 17-20, 2012. Proceedings

Abstract
The calculus of relations has been widely used in program specification and reasoning. It is very tempting to use such specifications as running prototypes of the desired program, but, even considering finite domains, the inherent partiality and non-determinism of relations makes this impractical and highly inefficient. To tame partiality we prescribe the usage of invariants, represented by coreflexives, to characterize the exact domains and codomains of relational specifications. Such invariants can be used as pre-condition checkers to avoid runtime errors. Moreover, we show how such invariants can be used to narrow the non-deterministic execution of relational specifications, making it viable for a relevant class of problems. In particular, we show how the proposed techniques can be applied to execute specifications of bidirectional transformations, a domain where partiality and non-determinism are paramount. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

2012

Multifocal: A Strategic Bidirectional Transformation Language for XML Schemas

Authors
Pacheco, H; Cunha, A;

Publication
Theory and Practice of Model Transformations - 5th International Conference, ICMT 2012, Prague, Czech Republic, May 28-29, 2012. Proceedings

Abstract
Lenses are one of the most popular approaches to define bidirectional transformations between data models. However, writing a lens transformation typically implies describing the concrete steps that convert values in a source schema to values in a target schema. In contrast, many XML-based languages allow writing structure-shy programs that manipulate only specific parts of XML documents without having to specify the behavior for the remaining structure. In this paper, we propose a structure-shy bidirectional two-level transformation language for XML Schemas, that describes generic type-level transformations over schema representations coupled with value-level bidirectional lenses for document migration. When applying these two-level programs to particular schemas, we employ an existing algebraic rewrite system to optimize the automatically-generated lens transformations, and compile them into Haskell bidirectional executables. We discuss particular examples involving the generic evolution of recursive XML Schemas, and compare their performance gains over non-optimized definitions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

2011

Algebraic Specialization of Generic Functions for Recursive Types

Authors
Cunha, A; Pacheco, H;

Publication
Electr. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci.

Abstract
Defining functions over large, possibly recursive, data structures usually involves a lot of boilerplate. This code simply traverses non-interesting parts of the data, and rapidly becomes a maintainability problem. Many generic programming libraries have been proposed to address this issue. Most of them allow the user to specify the behavior just for the interesting bits of the structure, and provide traversal combinators to "scrap the boilerplate". The expressive power of these libraries usually comes at the cost of efficiency, since runtime checks are used to detect where to apply the type-specific behavior. In previous work we have developed an effective rewrite system for specialization and optimization of generic programs. In this paper we extend it to also cover recursive data types. The key idea is to specialize traversal combinators using well-known recursion patterns, such as folds or paramorphisms. These are ruled by a rich set of algebraic laws that enable aggressive optimizations. We present a type-safe encoding of this rewrite system in Haskell, based on recent language extensions such as type-indexed type families.

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