LASIGE Talks are fortnightly/monthly events to publicize recently distinguished publications or ongoing cutting-edge work by researchers from the research centre, consolidating the scientific culture of the LASIGE community.

Speakers: Diana Costa (LASIGE, FCUL) and Cátia Pesquita (LASIGE, CMU)
Date: February 26th, 2025, Wednesday
Where: C6.3.27

Program:
11:45 Diana Costa
12:05 Cátia Pesquita
12:25 Q&A + Break for snacks & coffee

Talk1: Polymorphic Higher-Order Context-Free Session Types
Speaker: Diana Costa
In this talk, I will present an extension of polymorphic context-free session types that allows passing channels on channels, commonly known as higher-order session types. Decidability of type equivalence (we introduce a unifying approach that handles both the equivalence of functional and higher-order context-free session types) is obtained via reduction to bisimulation for simple grammars, for which practical algorithms are known. To bridge the gap between types and simple grammars, we introduce a language of types with canonical names
(c-types) instead of bindings and propose a notion of canonical renaming to translate types to c-types. This is a joint work with Andreia Mordido, Diogo Poças and Vasco Vasconcelos.

Talk2: The Immunopeptidomics Ontology: The Story Behind The Paper
Speaker: Cátia Pesquita
This talk is not about the Immunopeptidomics Ontology per se, but it will tell the story of how ImPO came to be, who built it, why and how. However, this is just the prelude to the epic tale of peer review where two houses—Semantic Web and Bioinformatics—“from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean”. Shakespearean tragedies aside, the immunopeptidome refers to the various peptides presented on the cell surface, which are an essential part of our immune system. Cancer immunotherapy and vaccine research can benefit immensely from understanding the immunopeptidome but the data is simply too large, too complex and too heterogeneous to make sense of without a shared terminology and a shared understanding. But, as you will learn, a shared understanding is never fully shared, nor fully understood.