International Symposium on Logical Formalization of Commonsense Reasoning

AAAI Spring Symposium Series

March 24-26, 2003

Stanford University

California, USA

One of the major long-term goals of artificial intelligence is to endow computers with commonsense reasoning capabilities. Although we know how to design and build systems that excel at certain bounded or mechanical tasks which humans find difficult, such as playing chess, we have little idea how to construct computer systems that do well at commonsense tasks which are easy for humans. Formalizing commonsense reasoning using logic-based approaches will be the focus of the symposium. Logic is a powerful modelling tool. Emphasis will be placed on representation rather than algorithms, and on formal rather than informal methods.

Commonsense reasoning is required in a wide variety of systems from autonomous lawn mowers to deep space probes. Systems that exhibit commonsense have to possess robust solutions to fundamental problems in knowledge representation. For example, an essential feature of commonsense reasoning is that it must deal with incomplete and uncertain information in dynamic environments responsively and appropriately. Furthermore, commonsense systems typically need to communicate with other systems in meaningful ways so ontological issues naturally arise.

Topics of interest will include:

• change, action, and causality
• elaboration tolerance
• agents, ability, planning and action
• ontologies, including space, time, shape, matter, networks and structures
• nonmonotonic reasoning
• probabilistic reasoning
• belief change, update, and revision
• cognitive robotics

The symposium will take place over three days and involve Invited Presentations from pioneers in the field, lively panel discussions, and paper presentations. If you would like to attend the symposium please send an expression of interest outlining your reasons to one of the Symposium Chairs.

Symposium Schedule

The Program is now available.

Invited Speakers

• Douglas Lenat, Cycorp
• Hector Levesque, University of Toronto, Canada
• John McCarthy, Stanford University, USA
• Marvin Minsky, MIT, USA

Symposium Chairs

Patrick Doherty
Department of Computer and Information Science

Linkoping University
Linkoping  581 83, Sweden
Tel. +46 13 242628
Email: patdo@ida.liu.se
URL: http://www.ida.liu.se/~patdo

John McCarthy

Department of Computer Science,
Gates Building, 2A, Stanford University

Stanford, CA 94305-9020, USA
Telephone: +1-650-723-4430
Email: jmc@steam.stanford.edu
URL: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc

Mary-Anne Williams

Innovation and Technology Research Laboratory
Faculty of Information Technology
University of Technology, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia
Telephone: +61-2-9514 4503
Email: Mary-Anne@it.uts,edu.au
URL: http://research.it.uts.edu.au/Mary-Anne

Program Committee

Eyal Amir, University of California Berkeley, USA
Vinay Chaudhri, SRI, USA
Tom Costello, IBM, USA
Ernie Davis, NYU, USA
Patrick Hayes, University of West Florida
Jim Hendler, University of Maryland, USA
Jerry Hobbs, SRI , USA
Fritz Lehmann, Austin, USA
Hector Levesque, University of Toronto, Canada
Vladimir Lifschitz, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Fangzhen Lin, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Leora Morgenstern, IBM, USA
Pavlos Peppas, AIT - Athens Information Technology, Greece
Murray Shanahan, Imperial College, UK
Yoav Shoham, Stanford University, USA