AI seminar: Uncertainty with logical, procedural and relational languages

Speaker: David Poole (University of British Columbia)

This tutorial gives an overview of rich representations for probabilistic reasoning. The first third of the tutorial gives the basics of logic, knowledge representation and probability. We then overview first-order representations where the semantics is the grounding of the representation. This is then compared to procedural languages. We then consider the problems of identity uncertainty and existence uncertainty. Finally we overview combinations of ontologies with uncertainty. Commonalities amongst formalisms is emphasized rather than the differences between them.

David Poole is a professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is known for his work on knowledge representation, default reasoning, assumption-based reasoning, diagnosis, reasoning under uncertainty, combining logic and probability, algorithms for probabilistic inference and representations for automated decision making. He is a co-author of an AI textbook, Computational Intelligence: A Logical Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1998), co-editor of the Proceedings of the Tenth Conference in Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (Morgan Kaufmann, 1994), is former associate editor and on the advisory board of the Journal of AI research, is secretary of the Association for uncertainty in AI, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.