Professor Samson Abramsky  from Oxford University was Topdrim’s invited speaker at the Information Processing in Complex Systems Workshop held in Barcelona during ECCS13. The talk was on Contextual Semantics: From Quantum Mechanics to Logic, Databases, Constraints, Complexity, and Natural Language Semantics.

Abstract:
Quantum Mechanics presents a disturbingly different picture of physical reality to
the classical world-view. These non-classical features also offer new resources and possibilities for information processing. At the heart of quantum non-classicality are the phenomena of non-locality, contextuality and entanglement. We shall describe recent work in which tools from Computer Science are used to shed new light on these phenomena. This has led to a number of developments, including a novel approach to classifying multipartite entangled states, and a unifying principle for Bell inequalities based on logical consistency conditions. At the same time, there are also striking and unexpected connections with a number of topics in classical computer science, including relational databases, constraint satisfaction, and natural language semantics. This is ongoing work, with a number of collaborators including Adam Brandenburger, Lucien Hardy, Shane Mansfield, Rui Soares Barbosa, Ray Lal, Phokion Kolaitis, Georg Gottlob, Jouko Vaananen and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh.