This award will support collaborative research in "New Foundations of Computer Science" between Professor John McCarthy, Stanford University, and Professor Masahiko Sato, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, and several of their colleagues in the United States and Japan. The purpose of the collaboration is to advance the understanding of mathematical foundations of computer science. There is need to bring together mathematical tools that have been developed in basic research in computer science, to obtain a better understanding of these tools, and to develop new tools for studying foundational issues. Fundamental issues such as abstract and special purpose logics, mechanized reasoning systems, and abstract descriptions of programming constructs are among the topics where progress can be expected from the cooperative effort. Progress in these areas of basic research can have important consequences in areas such as computer architectures, languages, and systems, as well as in artificial intelligence and logic. The study of logics for computation, mechanized reasoning systems, and theory of programming languages is a very rapidly growing field. The U.S. and Japanese researchers taking part in this joint effort have substantial expertise in the areas of logic, formal reasoning, and mathematics as well as experience in the application of this expertise to a wide range of basic problems in computer science. Previous interaction among several of the scientists has been productive. This current cooperative endeavor will provide an opportunity to discover new foundational methods and to apply existing methods to current problems of artificial intelligence and programming language theory.
