DEPARTMENT OF

MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Summer lectures
in Artificial Intelligence
-Speaker: Marc Denecker , KU Leuven, BE
Title: Foundation, implementation and application of the knowledge
base paradigm using FO(.)
May, 25, 27, 30, 2016 - h 15:00

-Speaker: Prof. Torsten Schaub, University of Potsdam, DE

Title: Theory solving made easy with clingo
June, 13, 2016 - h 11:00

-Speaker: Prof. Wolfgang Faber, University of Huddersfield, UK

Title: Answer Set Programming for Qualitative Spatio-temporal
Reasoning
June, 27, 2016 - h 11:00

-Speaker: Prof. Leonid Libkin, University of Edinburgh, UK

Title: Efficient Computation of Certain Answers: Breaking the CQ
Barrier
July, 13, 2016 - h 11:00

-Speaker: Prof. Georg Gottlob, Oxford University, UK

Title: Living with computational complexity
July, 20, 2016 - h 11:00

-Speaker: Prof. Grigoris Antoniou, University of Huddersfield, UK

Title: Large-Scale Reasoning through Mass Parallelization
July, 27, 2016 - h 11:00

The Director of the department

Nicola Leone

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Summer lectures in Artificial Intelligence

Title: "Foundation, implementation and application of the knowledge

base paradigm using FO(.)"

Speaker: Marc Denecker , KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract: This course is about the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
project IDP. The speaker will come back to classical logic, explain the good
ground in it and what it lacks for KRR. He will explain logic programming,
come back to the historical unsolved negation as failure problem, the solutions
that were proposed on the level of formal semantics, and important, on the
level of informal semantics. He will discuss the solution of viewing programs
as definitions and compare it with the view of programs as default/
autoepistemic theories. The need for adding (inductive) definitions to FO for
KRR will be motivated, and it will be shown that definitions cannot be expressed in FO using the compactness theorem. A logic extending logic programming under the well-founded semantics will be introduced. The link with stable semantics may be discussed as well. Then we see the knowledge base paradigm, a declarative problem solving paradigmis based on a strict separation of
information and problem. All the above will be illustrated in the context of
the IDP system.
Short Biography: Prof. Dr. Marc Denecker obtained a master in mathematics
and one in informatics at the KU Leuven, Belgium. He did his PhD at this
university and worked for several years as a postdoctoral researcher. He became Assistant Professor at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles and then obtained
a research position at the KU Leuven in 2002. Since 2015, he is a full Professor at the KU Leuven. He is head of the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning research group, with 7 PhD students and 3 faculty members. His current interests include a range of theoretical topics such as foundations of knowledge representation, nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming, classical
logic, fixpoint and modal logics, knowledge representation, and the use of formal specifications to solve computational problems by various forms of inference. At the computational level, he and his group is developing and implementing the knowledge base system IDP.
Date
May, 25,27,30, 2016

Time
15:00

Room
MT11 30B

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Summer lectures in Artificial Intelligence

Speaker: Prof. Torsten Schaub, University of Potsdam, DE

Title: Theory solving made easy with clingo
Abstract: Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a model, ground, and solve paradigm. The integration of application- or theory-specific reasoning into ASP
systems thus impacts on many if not all elements of its work-flow, viz., input
language, grounding, intermediate language, solving, and output format.
We address this challenge with the fifth generation of the ASP system clingo
and its grounding and solving components by equipping them with
well-defined generic interfaces facilitating the manifold integration efforts.
On the grounder's side, we introduce a generic way of specifying language
extensions and propose an intermediate format accommodating their ground
representation. At the solver end, this is accompanied by high- and mid-level
foreign language interfaces easing the integration of theory propagators dealing with these extensions.

Short Biography: Torsten Schaub is university professor at the University of

Potsdam, Germany, and holds an international chair at Inria Rennes, France.
He is a fellow of ECCAI and the current president of the Association of
Logic Programming.
His current research focus lies on Answer set programming (ASP) and its applications, which materializes at potassco.sourceforge.net, the home of the
open source project Potassco bundling software for ASP developed at Potsdam.

Date
June, 13, 2016

Time
11:00

Room
MT10-CUBO 30B

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Summer lectures in Artificial Intelligence

Speaker: Prof. Wolfgang Faber, University of Huddersfield, UK

Title: Answer Set Programming for Qualitative Spatio-temporal
Reasoning
Abstract: We study the translation of reasoning problems involving qualitative spatio-temporal calculi into answer set programming (ASP).
We present various alternative transformations and provide a qualitative comparison among them. An implementation of these transformations is provided by a tool that transforms problem instances specified in the language of
the Generic Qualitative Reasoner (GQR) into ASP problems. Finally, we report on an experimental analysis of solving consistency problems for Allens
Interval Algebra and the Region Connection Calculus with eight base relations (RCC-8).
Short Biography: Wolfgang Faber serves as Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Huddersfield (UK) and is on leave as Associate
Professor from the University of Calabria (Italy). Earlier, he served as an Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Technology, where he also obtained his PhD in 2002. From 2004 to 2006 he was on an APART grant of
the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His general research interests are in knowledge representation, logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning, planning, and knowledge-based agents. He has published more than 100 refereed
articles in major journals, collections and conference proceedings in these
areas. He is one of the architects of DLV, a state-of-the-art system for computing answer sets of disjunctive deductive databases, which is used all over
the world. He has acted as a chair for several workshops and conferences, has
been on the program committees of many of the major conferences of his
research areas, and has served on the editorial board and as a reviewer for
many journals and conferences on Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, and Logic Programming.
Date
June, 27, 2016

Time
11:00

Room
MT10-CUBO 30B

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Summer lectures in Artificial Intelligence

Speaker: Prof. Leonid Libkin, University of Edinburgh, UK

Title: Efficient Computation of Certain Answers: Breaking the CQ
Barrier
Abstract: Computing certain answers is the standard way of answering queries over incomplete data; it is also used in many applications such as data integration, data exchange, consistent query answering, ontology-based data access, etc. Unfortunately certain answers are often computationally expensive,
and in most applications their complexity is intolerable if one goes beyond
the class of conjunctive queries (CQs), or a slight extension thereof.
However, high computational complexity does not yet mean one cannot approximate certain answers efficiently. In this talk we survey several recent results on finding such efficient and correct approximations, going significantly
beyond CQs. We do so in a setting of databases with missing values, and first
-order (relational calculus/algebra) queries. Even the class of queries where
the standard database evaluation produces correct answers is larger than previously thought. When it comes to approximations, we present two schemes
with good theoretical complexity. One of them also performs very well in
practice, and restores correctness of SQL query evaluation on databases with
nulls.
Short Biography: Leonid Libkin is Professor of Foundations of Data Management in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He
was previously a Professor at the University of Toronto and a member of research staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill. He received his PhD from
the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. His main research interests are in the
areas of data management and applications of logic in computer science. He
has written five books and over 200 technical papers. His awards include a
Marie Curie Chair Award and five Best Paper Awards. He has chaired programme committees of major database conferences (ACM PODS, ICDT)
and was the conference chair of the 2010 Federated Logic Conference. He is
a fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a
member of Academia Europaea.
Date
July, 13, 2016

Time
11:00

Room
MT10-CUBO 30B

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Summer lectures in Artificial Intelligence

Speaker: Prof. Georg Gottlob, Oxford University, UK

Title: Living with computational complexity
Abstract: Many computational problems that are important in real life are
intractable. There are different ways of coping with intractability.
This talk will focus, in particular, on methods of recognizing large "islands of
tractability" for NP-hard problem, i.e., large tractable subclasses.
We will illustrate the use of graph-theoretic concepts such as treewidth and
hypertree width in order to obtain large polynomial classes of intractable problems. In addition,we will mention a number of other ways for coping with
complexity and illustrate how Logic Programming may help to recognize
that a problem is actually tractable. The talk will end with some thoughts of
more philosophical nature about the genesis of computational complexity.
Short Biography: Georg Gottlob is a Professor of Informatics at Oxford
University, a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and an Adjunct Professor
at TU Wien. His interests include knowledge representation and reasoning including ontological reasoning, logic and complexity, database theory, graph
decomposition techniques, and web data extraction. Gottlob has received the
Wittgenstein Award from the Austrian National Science Fund, is an ACM
Fellow, an ECCAI Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of
the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europaea. He chaired the Program Committees of
IJCAI 2003 and ACM PODS 2000. He is currently a member of the editorial
boards of journals, such as JACM and JCSS. He was the main founder of
Lixto (www.lixto.com), a company that provides datalog-based tools and services for web data extraction which was recently acquired by McKinsey &
Company. Gottlob was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator's Grant for
the project "DIADEM: Domain-centric Intelligent Automated Data Extraction Methodology" (see also http://diadem.cs.ox.ac.uk/). Based on the results of this and other projects, he recently co-founded in 2015 the Wrapidity
company at Oxford. More information on Georg Gottlob can be found on
his Web page: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/georg.gottlob/.
Date
July, 20, 2016

Time
11:00

Room
University Club

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Summer lectures in Artificial Intelligence

Speaker: Prof. Grigoris Antoniou, University of Huddersfield, UK

Title: Large-Scale Reasoning through Mass Parallelization
Abstract: Data originating from the Web, sensor networks and social media result
in increasingly huge datasets. The so called Big Data creates new opportunities for
advanced applications in domains ranging from smart cities to intelligent healthcare, hence the increasing interest in academia and industry. Usually Big Data is associated with machine learning / data mining. This talk will argue that semantic
and knowledge technologies have an important role to play. Traditionally, reasoning approaches have mostly focused on complex knowledge structures/
programs and centralized in-memory data, so the question arises whether and
how they can be adapated to scale sufficiently to meet the Big Data challenges.
This talk will review seminal work on large-scale massivelt parallel RDFS reasoning, before turning its attention to more recent works addressing more complex
reasoning tasks (computing the well-founded semantics of logic programs, and
ontology diagnosis and repair). The talk will conclude with a number of open research challenges in the area, and possible applications in the legal domain, relevant to the MIREL project.
Short Biography: Grigoris Antoniou is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Previously he has held professorial appointments at the
University of Crete (where he was also Head of the Information Systems Laboratory
at FORTH-ICS, the top-rated research institute in Greece), Griffith University, Australia, and the University of Bremen, Germany. His research interests lie in semantic technologies, particularly knowledge representation and reasoning and semantics for big data, and its application to ambient intelligence, e-health, and transportation. He has published over 200 technical papers in scientific journals and conferences. He is author of
three books with international publishers (MIT Press, Addison-Wesley); his book
A Semantic Web Primer is internationally the standard textbook in the area, and has
been or is about to be translated to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Greek. In
recognition of his work, he was elected an ECCAI Fellow in 2006, joining the prestigious list of the best AI researchers in Europe. He is member of three editorial boards
of journals, has organised a number of conferences and workshops (including leadership positions at ESWC 2010 and 2011), and has served in numerous programme committees. He has led a number of national and international research projects, and has
participated in many more.

Date
July, 27, 2016

Time
11:00

Room
MT10-CUBO 30B