Simon Castellan
I’m a researcher in computer science at Inria (CR) in the team Épicure, in Rennes, since January 2020.
Contact: simon (at) phis (dot) me
Short CV: I have done my PhD under the supervision of Olivier Laurent and Pierre Clairambault on the topic “Concurrent structures in game semantics.”. After that, from August 2017 to December 2019, I was a research associate (postdoc) with Nobuko Yoshida in the Mobility Reading Group.
Teaching
En 2025-2026, J’enseigne le cours Informatique et Anthropocène en M1 à l’ENS Rennes.
Research
My current research focuses in understanding the role computer science can play in the ecological transition. On this topic, I coordinate the computer science part of the interdisciplinary project Botascopia which arose in part out the Inria action exploratoire Back to the trees (Description du projet).
Before that, I worked on game semantics models of concurrent languages.
Publications
Lowtech identification of plants
- Back to the trees: Identifying plants with human intelligence. With Jos Käfer and Eric Tannier. (LIMITS’23)
Interactive database of Linear A inscriptions
- SigLA: The Signs of Linear A (With Ester Salgarella). (G21C’20)
Game Semantics on event structures
- Probabilistic programming inference via intensional semantics (With Hugo Paquet). (ESOP’19).
- Causality in Linear Logic (With Nobuko Yoshida). (FOSSACS’19).
- Two sides of the same coin: Session Types and Game semantics (With Nobuko Yoshida). (POPL’19) The implementation is available here.
- The concurrent game semantics of Probabilistic PCF (With Pierre Clairambault, Hugo Paquet, Glynn Winskel) (LICS’18)
- Non-angelic Concurrent Game Semantics (With Pierre Clairambault, Jonathan Hayman and Glynn Winskel). (FOSSACS’18).
- Observably Deterministic Concurrent Strategies and Intensional Full Abstraction for Parallel-Or (With Pierre Clairambault and Glyinn Winskel). (FSCD’17).
- Causality vs interleavings in concurrent games semantics (With Pierre Clairambault). (CONCUR’16).
- The parallel intensionally fully abstract games model of PCF. With Pierre Clairambault and Glynn Winskel. (LICS 2015)
- Symmetry in concurrent games. With Pierre Clairambault and Glynn Winskel. (LICS-CSL 2014)
- Strategies as concurrent processes. With Jonathan Hayman, Marc Lasson and Glynn Winskel (MPFS 2014)
- Thin Games with Symmetry and Concurrent Hyland-Ong Games (With Pierre Clairambault and Glynn Winskel). (LMCS)
- Games and strategies as event structures (With Pierre Clairambault, Sylvain Rideau, and Glynn Winskel) (LMCS).
- Concurrent Hyland-Ong games (With Pierre Clairambault and Glynn Winskel). (LMCS)
Type theory
- Undecidability of Equality in the Free Locally Cartesian Closed Category. With Pierre Clairambault and Peter Dybjer. (TLCA 2015)
- Undecidability of equality in the free locally cartesian closed category (extended version) (With Pierre Clairambault and Peter Dybjer). Accepted for publication in a special issue of LMCS of TLCA’15.
Research Software
Causality: A project to implement causal semantics of programming languages in OCaml. A demo with a subset of OCaml given concurrent semantics.
SigLA: An interactive database of Linear A inscriptions. With Ester Salgarella. The source code of the infrastructure is available here.
Thesis
Concurrent Structures in game semantics
You can also find the slides of the defense.
National conferences
- Weak memory models using event structures. (JFLA 2016)
- La stratégie de la fourchette. (JFLA 2015)
Talks
- Reconciling Nondeterminism and Causality: Event Structures for Weak Memory
- Non-angelic Concurrent Game Semantics (FOSSACS’18).
- Game Semantics and Session Types; Synchrony and Asynchrony. (GaLoP 2018)
- From event structure theory to weak memory models. (Talk at the PPLV seminar)
- From event structure theory to weak memory models. (Talk at the QMUL seminar)
- Towards a compositional and causal semantics of programming languages. (Talk at the LSV seminar)
- The parallel intensionally fully abstract games model of PCF. (Invited talk at CHoCoLa)
- On weak memory models using event structures:
- Comment un ordinateur cuisine-t-il (Exposé au labo junior « Appliquer »)
- Undecidability of Equality in the Free Locally Cartesian Closed Category (TLCA 2015)
- A game semantics of fork (GaLoP 2015)
- Tutorial on concurrent games (LIP)
- La stratégie de la fourchette (JFLA 2015)
- Concurrent games with symmetry (CSL-LICS 2014)