In Memoriam
"Knowledge representation and reasoning is a core research area in artificial intelligence. This research has provided deep insight into computational aspects of knowledge and formal aspects of commonsense reasoning. Besides its impact on artificial intelligence, knowledge representation has also contributed to the wider field of computer science. While the central issues have changed over the years, new open problems arise to challenge the best minds." Norman Foo, KR Conventicle 2002
The aim of the Australian Knowledge Representation Conventicle is to:
Examine the state-of-the-art in knowledge representation and reasoning
Identify the focal issues at hand
Set new directions for future research.
The conventicle is one-day long and will be held at UNSW Australia on February 23rd.
Location: CSE Seminar room (K17_113), Level 1, CSE Building (K17). Click here for a campus map.
Gerhard Lakemeyer, RWTH Aachen
Continual Planning in Golog
To solve ever more complex and longer tasks mobile robots need to generate more elaborate plans and must handle dynamic environments and incomplete knowledge. We address this challenge by integrating two seemingly different approaches -- PDDL-based planning for efficient plan generation and Golog for highly expressive behavior specification -- in a coherent framework that supports continual planning. The latter allows to interleave plan generation and execution through assertions, which are placeholder actions that are dynamically expanded into conditional sub-plans (using classical planners) once a replanning condition is satisfied. We formalize and implement continual planning in Golog which was so far only supported in PDDL-based systems. This enables combining the execution of generated plans with regular Golog programs and execution monitoring. Experiments on autonomous mobile robots show that the approach supports expressive behavior specification combined with efficient sub-plan generation to handle dynamic environments and incomplete knowledge in a unified way.
Gerhard Lakemeyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1990. After six years at the University of Bonn he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University, where he heads the Knowledge-Based Systems Group. He is also an Adjunct Faculty member at the University of Toronto and a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Gerhard's research interests include knowledge representation and cognitive robotics. He has published more than one hundred scientific papers and has served on numerous program committees, including IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, and KR. He is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), a member of the EurAI Board, and an Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Applied Logic, and was a member of the Editorial and Advisory Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
João Leite, New University of Lisbon
A Brief History of Updates of Answer-Set Programs
Over the last two decades there has been a considerable effort devoted to the problem of (rule based) answer-set program updates or, in other words, the problem of characterising the result from bringing up to date an answer-set program when the world it describes changes. Whereas the state-of-the-art approaches are guided by the same basic intuitions and aspirations as belief updates in the context of Classical Logic, they build upon fundamentally different principles and methods which have prevented a unifying framework that could embrace both belief and rule updates. In this talk I will overview some of the main approaches and results related to logic answer-set programming updates, while pointing out some of the main challenges that research in this topic has faced.
João Leite is Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and member of the Nova Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics (NOVA LINCS). João's main research interests include Knowledge Representation and Non-Monotonic Reasoning, Multi-Agent Systems, Semantic Web, and Argumentation for the Social Web. He has authored one book, edited several books and journal special issues, co-authored more than 100 papers, and presented more than 10 courses and tutorials in Conferences and Summer Schools. He was Conference Chair of JELIA-2004, Program Committee Co-Chair of JELIA-2014, and Co-Chair of several editions of the CLIMA, LADS and DALT workshops. He regularly serves in the Program Committees of major international conferences (IJCAI, AAAI, KR, AAMAS, ECAI, ICLP,...).
Torsten Schaub, Potsdam University
Towards Embedded Answer Set Solving
Answer Set Programming (ASP) offers a declarative tool for modeling and solving combinatorial (optimization) problems, while being tailored to knowledge representation and reasoning tasks. Its appealing combination of declarativeness and performance allows for concentrating on an actual problem, rather than a smart way of implementing it. So far, however, ASP was mainly used as a one-shot solving formalism, dealing with one problem at a time. On the other hand, in practice, ASP constitutes an under-the-hood technology that is usually embedded in a larger encompassing software system. This brings about the need to interact with an environment and to deal with its dynamics.
Torsten Schaub received his diploma and dissertation in informatics in 1990 and 1992, respectively, from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and his habilitation in informatics in 1995 from the University of Rennes I, France. Since 1997, he is University Professor for knowledge processing and information systems at the University of Potsdam. In 1999, he became Adjunct Professor at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, Canada; and since 2006 he is also an Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems at Griffith University, Australia. Since 2014, he holds an Inria International Chair at Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique. He has become a fellow of ECCAI in 2012. In 2014 he was elected President of the Association of Logic Programming. He served as program (co-)chair of LPNMR'09, ICLP'10, and ECAI'14. Torsten's research interests range from the theoretic foundations to the practical implementation of reasoning from incomplete, inconsistent, and evolving information.
There will be no registration fee. Coffee and lunch will be provided.
| 9:30 | Opening |
| Session 1 | |
| 9:35 | Keynote: Gerhard Lakemeyer. Continual Planning in Golog |
| 10:30 | Bernhard Hengst, David Rajaratnam (UNSW). A General Robotic Architecture for Integrating Symbolic and Sub-symbolic Representations |
| 10:50 | Coffee Break |
| Session 2 | |
| 11:10 | Xiaoyu Ge (ANU). Hybrid Physical Reasoning |
| 11:30 | Guifei Jiang (WSU). Reasoning About Game Strategies |
| 11:50 | Keynote: João Leite. A Brief History of Updates of Answer-Set Programs |
| 12:45 | Lunch Break |
| Session 3 | |
| 13:30 | Peng Zhang (ANU). Predicting Spatial Change |
| 13:50 | Jae Hee Lee (UTS). Spatial Problems with Preferences |
| 14:10 | Keynote: Torsten Schaub. Towards Embedded Answer Set Solving |
| 15:05 | Coffee Break |
| Session 4 | |
| 15:20 | Zhe Wang (Griffith University). Towards Scalable and Complete Query Explanation with OWL 2 EL Ontologies |
| 15:40 | Yi Zhou (WSU). Towards a Set Theoretic Knowledge Representation Approach |
| 16:00 | Ronald de Haan (TU Vienna). Using Parameterized Complexity to Analyze Problems Beyond NP |
| 16:20 | Short Break |
| Session 5 | |
| 16:30 | Rex Kwok. Phylogeny, Genealogy and the Linnaean Hierarchy: A Logical Analysis |
| 16:50 | Mike Gratton (UNSW). Contextual Reasoning |
| 17:10 | Yingzhi Gou (UOW). Semantic Annotations, State Update and the Agent Compliance Problem |
| 17:30 | Graham Billiau (UOW). Distributed Optimization and Multi-agent Non-monotonic Reasoning |
| 17:50 | Closing |