Section: Scientific Foundations

Probabilistic aspects

Participants : Miguel Andrés, Romain Beauxis, Filippo Bonchi, Christelle Braun, Jérémy Dubreil, Mario Sergio Ferreira Alvim Junior, Ivan Gazeau, Catuscia Palamidessi, Sylvain Pradalier, Marie-Aude Steineur.

The need to deal with probabilities can arise for various reasons:

First, algorithms for distributed systems and security protocols often use randomization.

Second, the modeling of the physical world frequently requires coping with uncertain and approximate information (for example, the number of the requests that are received by a web server during various times of the day), which one can refine by statistical measurements, and which can then be naturally represented using a probabilistic formalism.

Third, reality can sometimes be too complicated to be represented and analyzed in detail; probabilistic models offer then a convenient abstraction mechanism.