[FOM] ICCL Summer School: Logic-based Knowledge Representation

[Bertram Fronhoefer]

Call for Participation

   ICCL Summer School 2005
   
   LOGIC-BASED KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION
   
   Technische Universität 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 at 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   (Università 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  (Universität 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 Großmann  and   Steffen Hölldobler  (TU Dresden, Germany)





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