Arming Tweety with Jet Engines (is not enough)

Speaker: Torsten Schaub

Affiliation: University of Potsdam, Germany

Time: Thursday 07/04/2011 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: Answer Set Programming (ASP) is nowadays regarded as the major computational offspring of Nonmonotonic Reasoning (NMR). Beginning in NMR with phenomenon-oriented studies of nonmonotonicity in commonsense reasoning in the eighties, ASP has evolved into an attractive declarative problem solving paradigm, combining a rich but simple modeling language with high-performance solving capacities. This development has also led to evolving problem scenarios, beginning withthe famous Tweety scenarios, to artificial combinatorial problems, up to many case-studies as well as the first success stories in application domains. Despite its increasing popularity, however, ASP cannot yet be regarded as an established technology, matching the needs for a widely used problem solving paradigm. The talk will address this problem and discuss some of the major bottlenecks, challenges, and prospective solutions that ASP has to deal with in order to accomplish a true success story beyond the realm of NMR.

Biography: Torsten Schaub received his diploma and dissertation in informatics in 1990 and 1992, respectively, from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He received his habilitation in informatics in 1995 from the University of Rennes I, France. From 1990 to 1993 he was a Researcher at the Technical University at Darmstadt. From 1993 to 1995, he was a Research Associate at IRISA/INRIA at Rennes. From 1995 to 1997, he was University Professor at the University of Angers. At Angers he founded the research group FLUX dealing with the automatisation of reasoning from incomplete, contradictory, and evolutive information. 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 Griffiths University, Australia. His research interests range from the theoretic foundations to the practical implementation of methods for reasoning from incomplete and/or inconsistent information, in particular Answer set programming.