Dr. Jia Xiaodong from HNU School of Mathematics had his paperCommutative Monads for Probabilistic Programming Languagesaccepted at LICS2021 as the first author. The LICS Symposium is an annual international forum on theoretical and practical topics in computer science that relate to logic, broadly construed. Between 1986, when its first session was held at University of Cambridge, and 2020, a total of 9 papers written by Chinese authors were accepted at the symposiums. In 2021, three papers by first authors from Chinese institutions – the Chinese Academy of Science, Fudan University, and HNU – were accepted at the annual symposium.

Jia and the collaborative researcherssolved a long-standing open problem in the denotational semantics and Domain Theory– find a commutative monad for probability on the category DCPOand provide a denotational interpretation for high-order probability computing.This is an attempt to solve the famous Jung-Tix Problem in the Domain theory which was raised by Jung and Tix in 1998.

Jia put forward an approach to construct a commutative valuations monad, and identified three commutative monads based on the Keimel and Lawson’s K-category theory. He used these monads to provide a denotational semantics for the Probabilistic FixPoint (PFPC), and proved that in these denotational semantics, the calculation sequence of probability programming does not affect the final calculation result. This offers a solid and reliable mathematic theoretical foundation for further development of probabilistic calculus.