Interventions and Counterfactuals for the Working Programmer

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• Dario Stein (Radboud University)
• Friday 28 March 2025, 14:00-15:00
• SS03, Computer Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ioannis Markakis.

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.

This talk is part of the Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory) series.

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