Related papers: Causality, Knowledge and Coordination in Distribut…

In distributed systems where strong consistency is costly when not impossible, causal consistency provides a valuable abstraction to represent program executions as partial orders. In addition to the sequential program order of each…

This paper analyzes the notion of causality in a conceptual model, mainly as applied in software engineering. Conceptual system modeling can be considered a three-level process that begins with building a static structural description to…

Interactions between internet users are mediated by their devices and the common support infrastructure in data centres. Keeping track of causality amongst actions that take place in this distributed system is key to provide a seamless…

Concurrent systems identify systems, either software, hardware or even biological systems, that are characterized by sets of independent actions that can be executed in any order or simultaneously. Computer scientists resort to a causal…

This paper studies the interaction between knowledge, time and coordination in systems in which timing information is available. Necessary conditions are given for the causal structure in coordination problems consisting of orchestrating a…

Synchronization of chaos arises between coupled dynamical systems and is very well understood as a temporal phenomena which leads the coupled systems to converge or develop a dependence with time. In this work, we provide a complementary…

In theories of communication, it is usually presumed that the involved parties perform actions in a fixed causal order. However, practical and fundamental reasons can induce uncertainties in the causal order. Here we show that a maximal…

While probabilistic models describe the dependence structure between observed variables, causal models go one step further: they predict, for example, how cognitive functions are affected by external interventions that perturb neuronal…

Emerging application scenarios, such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing, call for coordination approaches addressing openness, self-adaptation, heterogeneity, and deployment agnosticism.…

Using symmetric boundary conditions at separated times, I show analytically that both the time ordering of (macroscopic) causality and the direction of entropy increase follow from these boundary conditions. In particular, when the…

Causality in distributed systems is a concept that has long been explored and numerous approaches have been made to use causality as a way to trace distributed system execution. Traditional approaches usually used system profiling and newer…

When is coordination intrinsically required by a distributed specification, rather than imposed by a particular protocol or implementation strategy? We give a general answer using minimal assumptions. In an asynchronous message-passing…

Coordinating activities at different sites of a multi-agent system typically imposes epistemic constraints on the participants. Specifying explicit bounds on the relative times at which actions are performed induces combined temporal and…

In this work, we study the propagation of influence and computation in dynamic distributed systems. We focus on broadcasting models under a worst-case dynamicity assumption which have received much attention recently. We drop for the first…

Inference of causality in time series has been principally based on the prediction paradigm. Nonetheless, the predictive causality approach may overlook the simultaneous and reciprocal nature of causal interactions observed in real world…

Causality is pivotal to our understanding of the world, presenting itself in different forms: information-theoretic and relativistic, the former linked to the flow of information, the latter to the structure of space-time. Leveraging a…

Computational analysis of time-course data with an underlying causal structure is needed in a variety of domains, including neural spike trains, stock price movements, and gene expression levels. However, it can be challenging to determine…

We introduce the coordination principle, which states that perfect coordination, in the form of agreement on a uniformly random output, among N parties is possible only if they share a common cause. This principle is purely causal and can…

Humans interpret the world around them in terms of cause and effect and communicate their understanding of the world to each other in causal terms. These causal aspects of human cognition are thought to underlie humans' ability to…

By relating and ordering events, causality constitutes a pivotal feature of our world. On the one hand, there are information-theoretic notions of causality defined in terms of the information processing ability of agents and on the other…