2 Research MSc+BSc Positions in Logic and Computation available

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Space, Time, and Knowledge

Supervisor: Michael Zakharyaschev
Areas of interest: Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, Automated Reasoning, Logic
Prerequisites: any programming language (Prolog, C++, Java, Lisp, etc.) and common sense

This "big" project consists of several independent projects thematically and technically closely connected to each other. All of them belong to one of the most interesting fields of artificial intelligence, which is concerned with developing software capable of qualitative reasoning about the world around us.

In the framework of the project we'll be considering some simple models of space, time, and knowledge. The aim is to develop software which, given descriptions like

"U.K. is a proper part of EU,
EU is part of England,
England is part of U.K."

or

"Agent A knows what she knows,
but she does not know what she does not know,"

could recognise whether they are consistent, or perform some other type of "intelligent" reasoning. In the case of spatial and temporal reasoning, an interesting problem is to visualise knowledge in one-, two-, etc. dimensional space and in various flows of time. For example,

"U.K. is a proper part of the EU"

can be represented in 1D as follows:

[____EU____(___UK___)_____]

Students with skills and interests in programming and research are welcome. The project may lead to publications and further work; it can be more "application-oriented" and involve a lot of programming, or more "theoretical" and involve designing and investigating new representation and reasoning formalisms.

If you want to do a project on one of the following or related areas, I'd be glad to supervise:

1. Spatial representation and reasoning in region connection calculus RCC-8.
2. Visualising configurations of spatial regions.
3. Temporal representation and reasoning in Allen's interval calculus.
4. Visualising configurations of temporal intervals.
5. Temporal representation and reasoning in point-based temporal logics.
6. Spatio-temporal representation and reasoning (interval-based).
7. Spatio-temporal representation and reasoning (point-based).
8. Knowledge representation and reasoning in concept description logics.
9. Reasoning about knowledge of agents.
10. Visualisation of labeled graphs (in particular, in LaTex).

For more information, see http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/mz/MScprojects.html or http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/mz/, or email mz at dcs.kcl.ac.uk