[PlanetKR] NMR'10 Invited Talks and Early Registration

[Evgenia (Eugenia) Ternovska]

NMR 2010 (Toronto, Canada, May 14-16) will feature an exciting  
collection of invited talks (please see the abstracts below),  
including a very special talk by Jack Minker devoted to the  
contributions of Ray Reiter who lived and worked in Toronto.

Early registration deadline: March 12 (i.e., NOW).

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/NMR2010/

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                                     Ray Reiter and Nonmonotonic  
Reasoning

                                                  by Jack Minker

Ray Reiter, was one of the leading researchers in the field of  
artificial intelligence at the time of his death, September 16, 2002,  
at the age of 63. He received many awards for his seminal  
contributions: Fellow of the ACM, the AAAI, the Royal Society of  
Canada and 1993 IJCAI Outstanding Contribution Award.

  Ray was one of the founders of the field of nonmonotonic reasoning,  
generally considered to have started in 1980. Thirty years later, in  
2010, in the city of his birth, Toronto, we appropriately celebrate  
Ray at the Nonmonotonic Reasoning International Conference. In this  
talk, I discuss Ray, the person, his major contributions to artificial  
intelligence in default reasoning, data and knowledge bases, cognitive  
reasoning and other topics related to nonmonotonic reasoning. I also  
discuss work spawned by his contributions.
It is a tribute to Ray that his seminal research is still as vibrant  
and cited today as it was 30 years ago.

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                          Arming Tweety with Jet Engines (is not enough)

                                             by Torsten Schaub

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  
with the
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 Nonmonotonic  
Reasoning.
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Dialectical Frameworks: Abstract Argumentation Beyond Dung

                                 by Gerhard Brewka

We will present dialectical frameworks, a powerful generalization of  
Dung-style argumentation frameworks where each node comes with an  
associated acceptance condition. This allows us to model different  
types of dependencies, e.g. support and attack, as well as different  
types of nodes within a single framework. We show that Dung's standard  
semantics can be generalized to dialectical frameworks, in case of  
stable and preferred semantics to a slightly restricted class which we  
call bipolar frameworks.

We show how acceptance conditions can be conveniently represented  
using weights respectively priorities on the links. We also  
demonstrate how some of the proof standards known from legal reasoning  
can be modeled based on this idea.

Furthermore, we establish links between dialectical frameworks and  
existing argumentation systems like Carneades. We also establish  
relationships to logic programming.

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  On the informal and formal semantics of Default and Autoepistemic  
logic

                              by Marc Denecker

Default and Autoepistemic logic were devised to model similar
kinds of common sense reasoning patterns. The talk revisits the
intuitions of Reiter and Moore in the context of the unifying semantic
framework developed by Denecker, Marek and Truszczynski.

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              Axiom Pinpointing in Description Logics

                                 by Franz Baader


Description Logics (DL) are a successful family of logic-based
knowledge representation languages, which can be used to represent
the conceptual knowledge of an application domain in a structured
and formally well-understood way. They are employed in various
application domains, such as natural language processing, databases,
the semantic web, and biomedical ontologies. As the size of DL knowledge
bases (KBs) grows, tools that support improving their quality become  
more
important. Standard DL reasoning can be used to computed implicit  
consequences
such as inconsistencies and inferred subsumption relationships, but it  
does
not explain the reasons for a given consequence.

Axiom pinpointing is a first step towards providing such an explanation.
Given a DL knowledge base and a consequence, it computes minimal
subsets of the axioms of the KB that have the consequence (MinAs).
In the talk, I will give an overview over different approaches for  
computing
MinAs employed in the DL community, and also mention results on
the complexity of the problem of computing all MinAs and of related
decision problems.
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