I mercoledì del Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica

Mercoledì 10 dicembre 2008, alle ore 17:00, presso l’Aula Multimediale,il Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica organizza il seguente seminario:

Action Languages - a Tool for Modeling Dynamic Systems

Relatore

Prof. Dr. Michael Gelfond, Texas Tech University


Sommario

In this talk I give a short introduction into theory and applications of action languages - simple logical formalisms for modeling dynamic system.
A theory (action description) of an action language defines a transition diagram containing all possible trajectories of the system. Due to the size of the diagram, the problem of finding its concise specification is not trivial and has been a subject of research for a comparatively long time. Its solution requires the good understanding of the nature of causal effects of actions in the presence of complex interrelations between fluents (propositions whose truth value may depend on the state of the system).
An additional level of complexity is added by the need to specify what is not changed by actions. The latter, known as the frame problem, is often reduced to the problem of finding a concise and accurate representation of the inertia axiom, a default which says that things normally stay as they are. The search for such a presentation substantially influenced AI research during the last twenty years. In this talk, I present the syntax and semantics of an action language, called AL, give the relationship between AL and the language of logic programs under the answer set/stable model semantics, and explain how this relationship can be used for building intelligent agents capable of planning, diagnostics, and other interesting types of reasoning.

Breve curriculum vitae

Michael Gelfond
Professor of Computer Science
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, Texas, USA
M.S. in Mathematics (1968),
St.Petersburg University, St.Petersburg, Russia
Ph.D. in Mathematics (1974)
Steklov Mathematical Institute, St.Petersburg, Russia

Honors, Awards, and Professional Service
AAAI fellow
The Burlington Northern Distinguished Achievement Award in Research
College of Engineering's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
Area Editor of the Journal of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (Knowledge Representation and Nonmonotonic Reasoning)
Executive Editor of the Journal of Logic and Computation.
Co-founder and co-head of the Knowledge Representation Lab
Co-organizer, Texas Action Group
Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning Conference


Areas of Interest
Knowledge representation and reasoning
logic programming
answer set programming


Summary of Research
Prof. Gelfond is interested in the development of languages for representing commonsense knowledge and investigating their mathematical and computational properties. His recent work deals with the semantics of logic programs and their extensions, logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning, formal representation of properties of actions and their effects , and developing software components for intelligent agents.