skip to content

Department of Computer Science and Technology

Date: 
Friday, 28 March, 2025 - 14:00 to 15:00
Speaker: 
Dario Stein (Radboud University)
Venue: 
SS03, Computer Laboratory

Correlation famously does not imply causation! But how then can we answer interventional questions such as "Does smoking cause cancer?" or even counterfactual ones as "If I had left one minute earlier, would I have managed to arrive on time?" This is the subject of Causal Inference, as pioneered and formalized by Judea Pearl. In my talk, I want to focus on how such problems can be modelled and solved using tools from programming languages theory.

I will aim to give a general introduction to causal inference from a programmer's point of view. I will then present work-in-progress from an ongoing collaboration dedicated to the extension of a probabilistic programming language to a causal probabilistic programming language; this includes operational semantics, a type system and denotational semantics using graded monads.

Seminar series: 
Logic and Semantics Seminar

Upcoming seminars