Seminar Beliefs and Causality WS 2015/2016

Sunday, Aug 2, 2015

In this seminar we will study papers from various subfields of Knowledge Representation. This includes belief revision; argumentation theory; planning; causality in general and the situation calculus in particular. All of these subfields of AI are related to each other. For example, one usually acts depending on what one believes, and actions in turn affect one’s beliefs. In this seminar, we will study recent papers on these topics (particularly from the IJCAI-15 conference).

Participation

A thorough knowledge of logic and knowledge representation is absolutely essential. Relevant courses include the Mathematical Logic course from the Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science group and our lectures on Knowledge Representation and The Logic of Knowledge Bases.

Topics

  • Belief Revision -Delgrande, Jin: Parallel Belief Revision: Revising by Sets of Formulas (PDF)
  • Causality
    • Halpern: A Modification of the Halpern-Pearl Definition of Causality (PDF)
  • Approximate Reasoning
    • Belle, Van den Broeck, Passerini: Hashing-based Approximate Probabilistic Inference in Hybrid Domains (PDF)
  • Argumentation
    • Baumann, Brewka: AGM Meets Abstract Argumentation: Expansion and Revision for Dung Frameworks (PDF)
    • Dung: On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games (PDF)
  • Planning
    • Bonet, Geffner: Belief Tracking for Planning with Sensing: Width, Complexity and Approximations (PDF)

Additional information

Introductory Meeting

  • The date and time for the introductory meeting will be announced here. Participation is compulsory.

Seminar Procedure

  • Besides writing your own term paper, you are asked to review other students’ term papers. We will use a conference management system (e.g., EasyChair) for this procedure. It will involve strict deadlines. Meeting these deadlines is mandatory. At the end of the seminar each student needs to give a talk on his topic in front of the other students and members of our group. Attendance of these talks and participation in the discussions is mandatory.

Seminar Date

  • The seminar will be held as a block seminar on one day.

Typesetting

  • You may use this LaTeX template for your term paper.

General Info

  • The introductory slides contain information about the schedule and requirements.

Library Tour

  • Renate Eschenbach from the Computer Science Library offers guided tours on how to find literature in the library and how to prepare a seminar. Interested students should enlist for a tour in the preliminary discussion.

SemBC-2015.pdf