Informatics seminar on Tuesday, December 16th at 15.30 - Prof. Grigoris Antoniou

Staff - Faculty of Informatics

Start date: 16 December 2008

End date: 17 December 2008

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Prof. Grigoris Antoniou

 

TITLE: Efficient Reasoning about Context for Ambient Intelligence environments

 

SPEAKER: Prof. Grigoris Antoniou , University of Crete

 

DATE: Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

 

PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)

 

TIME: 15.30

 

ABSTRACT:

The imperfect nature of context in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments, and the special characteristics of the entities that possess and share the available context information render contextual reasoning a very challenging task. The accomplishment of this task requires formal models that handle the involved entities as autonomous logic-based agents, and provide methods for handling the imperfect and distributed nature of context.

 

In this talk, we propose a solution based on the Multi-Context Systems formalism, in which local context knowledge of AmI agents is encoded in rule theories (contexts), and information flow between agents is achieved through mapping rules associating concepts used by different contexts. To handle the imperfect context, we extend Multi-Context Systems with non-monotonic features: local defeasible theories, defeasible mappings, and a preference relation on the system contexts. We present this novel representation model, called Contextual Defeasible Logic, describe how its elements are used to derive distributed conclusions through a proof theory, propose an algorithm for distributed query evaluation that implements the proof theory of Contextual Defeasible Logic, and describe a number of formal properties.

 

BIO:

Grigoris Antoniou is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete, and Head of the Information Systems Laboratory at FORTH-ICS, the top-rated research institute in Greece. Previously he has held professorial appointments at Griffith University, Australia, and the University of Bremen, Germany.

 

His research interests lie in semantic technologies, particularly knowledge representation and reasoning, and its application to ambient intelligence, e-commerce, and cultural informatics. He has published over 150 technical papers in scientific journals and conferences. He is author of three books with international publishers (MIT Press, Addison-Wesley); his book "A Semantic Web Primer" is internationally the standard textbook in the area, and has been or is about to be translated to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Greek. In recognition of his work, he was elected an ECCAI Fellow in 2006, joining the prestigious list of the best AI researchers in Europe.

 

He is member of three editorial boards of journals, has organised a number of conferences and workshops, and has served in numerous programme committees. He has led a number of national and international research projects, and has participated in many more. Since 2008 he is member of the ECCAI Board.

 

HOST: Prof. Evanthia Papadopoulou