Research Centre for Machine Learning Seminar
Prof Alan Bundy, CBE, FRS, University of Edinburgh
Date & Time: Wed, 26 Oct 2016, 12:00noon
Venue: AG21 (College Building)
TITLE: Reformation: a generic algorithm for repairing faulty representations.
ABSTRACT: Autonomous agents require representations of their environment to interpret sensory data, make plans to achieve their goals and solve other problems. Good representations are key to effective problem solving. Historically, they have been manually constructed and tuned to suit a particular task and environment. As we aspire to build persistent, autonomous agents in changing environments interacting with changing populations of other agents and changing tasks, then these agents’ representations must also evolve automatically. Such evolution will not just be to change beliefs within a fixed language, but the language itself must also sometimes change, i.e., old concepts will be replaced with new. Faults in representations are often detected by failures of inference, e.g., inconsistency and incompleteness. The reformation algorithm generalises our previous work on domain-specific representational repair to provide a generic mechanism with a potentially wide application. I will describe reformation and illustrate it on a variety of examples.
Speaker Bio: Alan Bundy is Professor of Automated Reasoning in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include: the automation of mathematical reasoning, with applications to reasoning about the correctness of computer software and hardware; and the automatic construction, analysis and evolution of representations of knowledge. His research combines artificial intelligence with theoretical computer science and applies this to practical problems in the development and maintenance of computing systems. He is the author of over 290 publications and has held over 60 research grants. He is a fellow of several academic societies, including the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. His awards include the IJCAI Research Excellence Award (2007), the CADE Herbrand Award (2007) and a CBE (2012). He was: Edinburgh’s founding Head of Informatics (1998-2001); founding Convener of UKCRC (2000-05); and a Vice President and Trustee of the British Computer Society with special responsibility for the Academy of Computing (2010-12). He was also a member of: the Hewlett-Packard Research Board (1989-91); the ITEC Foresight Panel (1994-96); both the 2001 and 2008 Computer Science RAE panels (1999-2001, 2005-8); and the Scottish Science Advisory Council (2008-12).
