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Reasoning about Actions and Change

Recommended for
ECSEL and other graduate students.

The course was last given
New course.

Goals
Participants in the course shall obtain an understanding and concrete knowledge of the variety of approaches that are presently being pursued, in current research, to the logic-based representation of dynamic systems, in the sense of systems that change over time.

Prerequisites
ECSEL fundamenta are assumed. The course on AI/KR (TDDA 16) or the ECSEL fundamenta course on Knowledge Representation are particularly important.
Students not having all the ECSEL fundamenta should contact the course leader for advice whether she/he is recommended to try this course.
Related ECSEL courses
Other KR courses, naturally. Also the course on Hybrid Systems.

Organization
The course will be organized so as to confront two types of sources. First, we use precise accounts of the approaches mentioned under "contents". The reference articles that have been submitted to the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence will be used for this purpose.
These approaches are then confronted to various accounts of what are the important problems in this area. This will be a broader set of literature, taken both within the speciality at hand and from neighboring areas. Different course participants will be assigned partly different reading lists, and the course meetings will be used for discussing the perspectives that the participants obtained from their different sources.

Contents
The course will particularly address the following approaches to reasoning about actions and change:

  • The situation calculus (Reiter and McCarthy variants)
  • Time and action logics; cognitive robotics logic
  • Action languages
  • The event calculus
  • The fluent calculus

Literature
For the first aspect of the course (compare under "Organization" above) we use the following articles:
f-cis.linep.se-98-014 Michael Thielscher.Introduction to the Fluent Calculus. Linköping University Electronic Press, 1998: [original publication]f-cis.linep.se-98-015 Patrick Doherty, Joakim Gustafsson, Lars Karlsson, and Jonas Kvarnström. TAL: Temporal Action Logics Language Specification and Tutorial. Linköping University Electronic Press, 1998: [original publication] f-cis.linep.se-98-016 Michael Gelfond and Vladimir Lifschitz. Action Languages. Linköping University Electronic Press, 1998: [original publication] f-cis.linep.se-98-017 Erik Sandewall. Cognitive Robotics Logic and its Metatheory: Features and Fluents Revisited. Linköping University Electronic Press, 1998: [original publication] f-cis.linep.se-98-018 Hector Levesque, Fiora Pirri, and Ray Reiter. Foundations for the Situation Calculus. Linköping University Electronic Press, 1998: [original publication]
For the second aspect, each participant will obtain a personalized reading list.

Teachers
Erik Sandewall

Examiner
Erik Sandewall

Schedule
Mars-May, 2000.

Examination
Each participant will be requested to write a brief memo (5-10 pages) summarizing the position that she or he has developed through the course. The course credits are conditional on having written such a paper.

Credit
4 points.

Comments
Advanced ECSEL Course

All information about the course will be posted on the webpage for Knowledge Representation courses, http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/kr/
Maintenance Latest update 21.4.1999 by EMTEK group. information: Edit mode html, position code C.kr.courses.rach.


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