PhD student position or postdoctoral position on Knowledge Representation, Leuven (Belgium)

The Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) research group at the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering of the KU Leuven has an open position for a PhD student or Postdoc.

The group of prof. Marc Denecker and prof. Gerda Janssens explores the Knowledge Base paradigm in which domain knowledge is expressed in a declarative Knowledge Base (KB) and (re-)used to solve various computational problems by applying suitable forms of inference. The group designs language constructs and methodologies for knowledge representation languages and develops the Knowledge Base system IDP. It also uses other state of the art technology (e.g., systems from Answer Set Programming, Constraint Programming and Sat Modulo Theory systems such as Z3).

Your research will cover the following topics.
- You will learn formal and informal aspects of KR languages.
- You will learn about implementation of inference techniques for KB systems.
- You will use such tools to develop KB solutions for knowledge intense business and legal applications.
- Much focus will be on interactive applications where many functionalities are required and a range of interesting inference tasks arise. You will design new language constructs to improve KR in these fields.
- You will develop tools that help domain experts in expressing their knowledge in natural but formally precise way.