“The thesis is a very nice introduction to the area of time granularities and indeed also automata on infinite strings or trees. All major notions are discussed, formally introduced, exemplified, and compared to similar notions. The language is generally appropriate and understandable and the mathematics in the contribution should be understandable by any graduate student. Since the essential definitions and proofs are provided, the book can easily be read without additional literature.” (Andreas Maletti, Mathematical Reviews, February, 2016)

Automata for Branching and Layered Temporal Structures

Name: Automata for Branching and Layered Temporal Structures
Author: Gabriele Puppis

An Investigation into Regularities of Infinite Transition Systems

von Gabriele Puppis

Since 2002, FoLLI awards an annual prize for an outstanding dissertation in the fields of Logic, Language, and Information. This book is based on the Ph. D. thesis of Gabriele Puppis, who was the winner of the E. W. Beth dissertation award for 2007. Puppis' thesis focuses on Logic and Computation and, more specifically, on automata-based decidability techniques for time granularity and on a new method for deciding Monadic Second Order theories of trees. The results presented represent a significant step towards a better understanding of the changes in granularity levels that humans make so easily in cognition of time, space, and other phenomena, whereas their logical and computational structure poses difficult conceptual and computational challenges.