Logic List Mailing Archive

Summer School on "Logic-Based Knowledge Representation" (Dresden, July 2005)

Call for Participation

    ICCL Summer School 2005

    LOGIC-BASED KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

    Technische Universit?t Dresden
    2nd - 17th July 2005

    http://www.computational-logic.org/iccl-ss-2005



TOPIC

    The topic of this year's summer school is Logic-based
    Knowledge Representation.

    Intelligent behavior is hard to imagine without
    the agent having a good knowledge about the surrounding
    world. For this reason, knowledge representation always
    played a crucial role in artificial intelligence.
    Right from the beginning of the field, there was
    a big discussion on whether sub-symbolic or symbolic
    approaches for representing knowledge are the right way
    to go. And even within the symbolic approach there
    was a conflict between proponents of logic-based
    approaches (like John MacCarthy and Pat Hayes) and
    proponents of graph-based or procedural approaches
    (like Marvin Minsky).

    The advantage of logic-based approaches for symbolic
    knowledge representation is that they provide the
    representation formalism with a formally well-founded
    semantics, which makes both the represented knowledge
    and the behavior of knowledge representation systems
    deducing implicit knowledge from the explicitly represented
    one comprehensible. The disadvantage is that the inference
    problems may become intractable or even undecidable if
    the expressive power of the formalism is large enough.
    For this reason, early systems employing the logic-based
    approach were either too inexpressive or too slow.

    This situation has changed drastically in the last 10-15 years.
    This is partially due to increased computing power. More
    importantly, however, were the recent theoretical and practical
    advances in the field of logic-based knowledge representation.
    The summer school will focus on several of the most successful
    subfields of this active research area:
     - reasoning about action and change,
     - nonmonotonic reasoning,
     - description logics and ontologies, and
     - action planning.


REGISTRATION

    If you want to attend the summer school, we'd prefer that
    you register by April 9, 2005.
    For all who want to apply for a grant, this deadline is
    obligatory.
    After April 9 registration wil be possible as long as
    there are vacant places.
    (Since we intend to restrict participation to about 60
    people, in case of excessive demand, we will have to
    select applicants to the summer school.)

    People applying until April 9 will be informed about
    admittance and decisions on grants until April 18, 2005.


FEES

    We ask for a participation fee of 200 EUR.


INTEGRATED workshop

    It will be possible for some participants to present their
    research work during a small workshop integrated in the
    summer school: please indicate in the registration form if
    you would like to do so and give us the title of your
    proposed talk there.  In addition, please submit an
    extended abstract in postscript or pdf format of max. 5
    pages to iccl05ws@tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de by April 9, 2005.

    A program committee consisting of the summer school
    lecturers and organizers will select among the proposals.

    Notification of acceptance of a talk at the integrated
    workshop will be by May 9, 2005.

GRANTS

    A limited number of grants may be available, please indicate
    in your application if the only possibility for you to
    participate is via a grant. Applications for grants must
    include an estimate of travel costs and they should be sent
    together with the registration.


COURSE PROGRAM


Nonmonotonic Logics: History, foundations, challenges
Piero A. Bonatti   (Universit? di Napoli `Federico II', Italy)

Answer Set Programming
Thomas Eiter  (TU Wien, Austria)

Ontologies
Ian Horrocks  (University of Manchester, United Kingdom)

Action Planning: Recent Theoretical and Practical Advances
Bernhard Nebel  (Universit?t Freiburg, Germany)

Description Logics
Ulrike Sattler  (University of Manchester, United Kingdom) and
Carsten Lutz  (TU Dresden, Germany)

Action Programming Languages
Michael Thielscher  (TU Dresden, Germany)

Reasoning and Acting under Uncertainty
Axel Gro?mann  and   Steffen H?lldobler  (TU Dresden, Germany)