Distributed Reasoning about Context: Theory and Applications

Speaker: Grigoris Antoniou

Affiliation: University of Crete, Greece

Time: Tuesday 08/02/2011 from 14:00 to 15:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Penrith (Y239), accessible from Parramatta (EB.1.32) and Campbelltown (26.1.50).

Abstract: Interest in formalizations of contextual information and inter-contextual information flow has steadily increased over the past few years. Intuitively, a multi-context system describes the information available in a number of contexts (such as people/agents/databases/modules) and specifies the information flow between those contexts through mapping rules associating concepts used by different contexts. Almost all theoretical work in the field is based on classical, monotonic reasoning. However, the imperfect nature of context in key application areas, such as ambient intelligence, mobile and and social computing, and the special characteristics of the entities that possess and share the available context information in such systems, render contextual reasoning a very challenging task.

In this talk, we propose a solution by extending multi-context systems with non-monotonic features: local defeasible theories, defeasible mappings, and a preference relation on the system contexts. We present this novel representation model, describe a formal argumentation semantics, propose an algorithm for distributed query evaluation, and give a number of formal properties. We also present specific application scenarios in ambient intelligence and social computing and outline their implementation and evaluation. We conclude with a number of issues for future research.

Biography:

Grigoris Antoniou is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete, and Head of the Information Systems Laboratory at FORTH-ICS, the top-rated research institute in Greece. Previously he has held professorial appointments at Griffith University, Australia, and the University of Bremen, Germany.

His research interests lie in knowledge representation and semantic technologies, and their application to web information systems and ambient intelligence. He has published over 150 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.

He is member of three editorial boards of journals, and has served in numerous programme committees. Among others, he is PC-Chair of the 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010) and General Chair of ESWC 2011. Since 2008 he is member of the ECCAI Board. He has led a number of national and international research projects, and has participated in many more. Among others, he is Activity Leader (Research) for the recently funded European Network of Excellence PlanetData on large-scale semantic data management (2010-2014).

In recognition of his work, he was elected an ECCAI Fellow in 2006, joining the prestigious list of the best AI researchers in Europe.