• Latest News
• Course Description
• Course Schedule
• Course Exam
• Course Literature
• Some Useful Links
• Faculty

Latest News

• First Seminar: January 21, 13-15, AG24

Course Description

Course Schedule

In the following schedule, please disregard the formal distinction between a föreläsning (Sem) and a lecture (Lek) . The course consists of 18 sessions, some more practical than others.

patdo (Patrick Doherty) - General sessions.
larka (Lars Karlsson) - Practical sessions.

RR: (Required Reading) - These articles should be read preferably before each seminar. See articles for an enumerated list of course articles.
SR: (Suggested Reading) - These articles supplement the required course material.
"LN" stands for Lecture Notes, which will be distributed.

Week 04

Tuesday, 13-15, AG24, patdo

Sem1. -- An overview of the course topics is provided, course material is distributed, and administrative details are discussed.

RR: (17) pp.1-9, (3), pp. 31-65.

Wednesday, 13-15, AG26, patdo

Sem2. -- We discuss knowledge representation in broad terms, the role of logic in AI, and different methodologies used in knowledge representation.

RR: LN2, (9), (12) pp. 431-438, (13) pp. 24-27,29,30.
SR: (12) pp. 444-450 sec. 1, (14), (4).

Thursday, 15-17, AG23, patdo

Sem3. -- In the third and fourth seminars, we will discuss temporal reasoning in general, including a number of techniques used to represent temporal facts. We will then study three existing temporal logics in detail that use these techniques. The techniques studied more or less cover the spectrum of logics used for temporal reasoning in AI.

RR: LN3/4, (1) pp. 87-103, (18) pp. 89-104, (12) pp. 438-441 sec 2.

Friday, 15-17, AG23, patdo

Lek1. -- See Seminar three.

Week 05

Monday, 13-15, AG23, larka

Sem4. -- In this session, Lars will discuss the three temporal logics more concretely, do a number of exercises that involve representing action scenarios, and hand out some take-home exercises.

Tuesday, 10-12, S14, patdo

Sem5. -- We will discuss the frame, qualification and ramification problems in terms of how they arose in attempting to do planning with monotonic versions of the situation calculus. We will consider the Monkey and Bananas problem used by Green and extend it iteratively until we have a reasonable syntactic representation of the problem, but still lack an essential element: nonmonotonic inference.

RR: LN6, (6) pp. 202-208 and appendix.

Friday, 10-12, FG13, patdo

Lek2. -- In this session, we will discuss nonmonotonic reasoning and we will study a number of different forms of Circumscription in detail. We will also discuss logics of preferential entailment.

RR:LN7/8, (2) pp. 49-63.
SR: (15).

Week 06

Monday, 15-17, AG28, patdo

Sem6. -- In this session, we continue the discussion pertaining to Circumscription techniques.

Friday, 8-10, T31, larka

Lek3. -- In this session, Lars will do a number of practical exercises pertaining to Circumscription and preferential entailment. Take-home exercises will also be distributed.

Week 07

Monday, 13-15, AG23, patdo

Sem7. -- In this session, we will discuss the Yale Shooting problem and approaches to its solution using chronological minimization.

RR: LN10, (7) pp. 328-333, (19) pp. 396-409, (10), (17) pp. 10-27.
SR:

Wednesday, 8-10, AG28, patdo

Sem8. -- In this session, we will discuss causal minimization as a solution to the frame problems.

RR: LN11, (11) pp. 410-419, (8) pp. 267-283.
SR: (11) pp. 420-431.

Friday, 13-15, AG26, larka

Lek4. -- In this session, Lars will consider a number of scenarios using the methods discussed in the previous two sessions.

Week 08

Tuesday, 10-12, FG13, patdo

Sem9. -- In this session, we will discuss Features and Fluents and introduce the concept of inhabited dynamic systems and its associated underlying semantics. In addition, we will discuss the conceptual space of ontological and epistemological assumptions.

RR: (17) pp. 28-54, FF Ch 1.1-1.5, Ch 2.1-2.7, Ch 3.1-3.3.

Wednesday, 13-15, AG24, patdo

Sem10. -- In this session, we will discuss Discrete Feature Logic, the temporal logic used in Features and Fluents to reason about action and change.

RR: FF Ch 4.1-4.5, Ch 5.1-5.5, Ch 6.1-6.6.

Friday, 10-12, AG27, patdo

Lek5. -- In this session, we will discuss the K-IA class of action scenarios, chronical completion, the K-IA benchmarks and a number of different minimization policies used to define preferential entailment. We will also consider filtering and occlusion.

RR:FF Ch 7.1-7.4, Ch 8.1-8.3, Ch 9.1, 9.3-9.4, Ch 11.1-11.3.

Week 09

Tuesday, 13-15, AG27, patdo

Sem11. -- In this session, we will discuss assessment techniques for determining the proper use of the logics described in previous sessions. We will also round off our coverage of the Features and Fluents framework.

SR: FF Ch 9.2, Ch 11.6, 11.8, Ch 13.

Wednesday, 13-15, U15, larka

Sem12. -- In this session, Lars will consider a number of practical examples involving scenarios in the K-IA class and the use of logics of preferential entailment.

Week 10

Monday, 8-10, AG28, patdo

Lek6. -- In this session, we will review what we discussed during the course, compare Features and Fluents with other frameworks, and discuss current research issues in this area. You will also have the opportunity to ask questions regarding the exam material and provide general comments.

RR: (16), FF Ch 14.

Course Literature

Course Book

Features and Fluents: A Systematic Approach to the Representation of Knowledge about Dynamical Systems,
Erik Sandewall,
Oxford University Press, 1994.

Selection of Articles

1. F. Bacchus, J. Tenenberg and J. A. Koomen, A non-reified temporal logic, Artificial Intelligence , 52, (1991), pp. 87-108.
2. G. Brewka, Chapter 4: Circumscription. In Nonmonotonic Reasoning: Logical Foundations of Commonsense. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
3. M. Davis, First-order logic. In D.M. Gabbay, C. J. Hogger, and J. A. Robinson, editors, Logical Foundations , volume 1 of Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming. Oxford University Press, 1993.
4. R. Davis, H. Shrobe, and P. Szolovits, What is knowledge representation?, AI Magazine, Spring 1993, The AAAI Press, 1993, pp. 17-33.
5. P. Doherty, Reasoning about action and change using occlusion, Proceedings of the 11th International European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI94), pp. 401-405, 1994.
6. C. Green, Applications of theorem-proving to problem solving, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-69), 1969.
7. S. Hanks and D. McDermott, Default reasoning, nonmonotonic logics, and the frame problem, Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-86) , pp. 328-333, 1986.
8. B. Haugh, Omniscience isn't needed to solve the frame problem, International Journal of Expert Systems Research and Applications , 3 (3), 1990, pp. 267-292. JAI Press.
9. D. Israel, The role(s) of logic in artificial intelligence. In D.M. Gabbay, C. J. Hogger, and J. A. Robinson, editors, Logical Foundations , volume 1 of Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming. Oxford University Press, 1993.
10. H. Kautz, The logic of persistence, Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-86) , pp. 401-405, 1986.
11. V. Lifschitz, Formal theories of action. In F. Brown, editor, Proceedings of the 1987 Workshop on the Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence, Lawrence, Kansas, 1987. Morgan Kaufmann.
12. J. McCarthy and P. J. Hayes, Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. In B. Meltzer and D. Mitchie, editors, Machine Intelligence 4, Edinburgh University Press, 1969, pp. 463-502.
13. J. McCarthy, Epistemological problems of artificial intelligence, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-77), 1977.
14. J. McCarthy, Programs with common sense. In M. Minsky, editor, Semantic Information Processing , MIT Press, 1968, pp.403-418.
15. J. McCarthy, Applications of circumscription to common-sense knowledge, Artificial Intelligence , 28, (1986), pp. 89-116.
16. L. Morgenstern, The problem with solutions to the frame problem, In K. Ford and Z. Pylyshyn, editors, The Robot's Dilemma Revisited. Ablex, 1996.
17. E. Sandewall and Y. Shoham, Nonmonotonic temporal reasoning. In D.M. Gabbay, C. J. Hogger, and J. A. Robinson, editors, Epistemic and Temporal Reasoning , volume 4 of Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming. Oxford University Press, 1994.
18. Y. Shoham, Temporal logics in AI: semantical and ontological considerations, Artificial Intelligence , 33(1), (1987), pp. 89-104.
19. Y. Shoham, Chronological Ignorance: An Experiment in Nonmonotonic Temporal Reasoning.

Some useful Links

• The DLS algorithm is an algorithm for reducing second-order formulas to logically equivalent first-order formulas. You can test the experimental interactive implementation and try to reduce some of the circumscription axioms described in the course!
• The European Colloquium for Spatial and Temporal Reasoning (ECSTER) is organized by the Compulog SIG for Spatial and Temporal Reasoning and it's web page contains a plethora of useful information relating to spatial and temporal reasoning.
• The reasoning about actions link has been compiled by Rob Miller and contains links to a large number of researchers actively working in the area of reasoning about actions and time.

Course Examination

• The first part includes a number of take-home exercises and reading material essential to an understanding of the techniques and concepts used when reasoning about action and change.
• The second part consists of a 30 minute individual oral examination in which you must convince me that you have a working understanding of the area, and are not only able to answer questions in a satisfactory manner, but also to ask insightful questions.

Faculty

Gunilla Blom-Lingenhult (Course Administrator)
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Linköping
S-581 83 Linköping, SWEDEN
Phone: +46 13 28 22 97
Telefax: +46 13 28 44 99
Room: FOA V0.208