About

The people and institutions behind the Reticulate project.

Author

Alexandre Zua Caldeira

PhD Researcher

PhD student at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon (FCUL), affiliated with LASIGE (Large-Scale Informatics Systems Laboratory). Research focus: session types, type theory, and programming language design.

The Reticulate project is Alexandre's doctoral research, developing the theory and toolchain for session types as algebraic reticulates under the supervision of Prof. Vasco T. Vasconcelos.

Website GitHub

Supervisor

Prof. Vasco T. Vasconcelos

Full Professor, FCUL

Vasco T. Vasconcelos is a Full Professor at the Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. He is a leading researcher in session types, with foundational contributions to the theory of behavioural types for concurrent and distributed systems.

His work includes the original BICA project (2009), which pioneered annotation-based session type checking for Java objects — the direct predecessor to BICA Reborn.

Homepage

Institution

LASIGE — University of Lisbon

LASIGE (Large-Scale Informatics Systems Laboratory) is a research unit of the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon (FCUL). Rated "Excellent" by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), LASIGE conducts research in areas including dependable and secure computing, data and systems intelligence, and software engineering.

The Reticulate project is developed within LASIGE's software engineering and programming languages research line.

LASIGE FCUL University of Lisbon

The Project

Reticulate is a research project with three pillars:

  1. Theory — Proving that session-type state spaces are lattices; developing the morphism hierarchy (isomorphism, embedding, projection, Galois connection); connecting to bisimulation and abstract interpretation.
  2. Reticulate (tool) — A Python library and web tool that constructs state spaces from session type definitions, checks lattice properties, computes morphisms, and visualizes Hasse diagrams.
  3. BICA Reborn — A Java annotation-based session type checker for objects, successor to the original BICA (2009). The key novelty is the ∥ (parallel) constructor for concurrent access, which forces lattice structure.

Contact

For questions about the research or collaboration inquiries, please reach out via the institutional channels listed above or through the GitHub repository.