I am pleased to invite you to the following seminar of the Faculty of Computer Science of Bolzano-Bozen.

DATE: Wednesday, 16 December, 13:00-14:00

PLACE: Room F001, (Design Building, Universitätsplatz 1 - piazza Università, 1, Bozen-Bolzano)

TITLE: Reasoning about Context with Conflicts in Ambient Intelligence Environments

SPEAKER: Prof. Grigoris Antoniou (University of Crete and Information Systems Laboratory, FORTH, Heraklion, Greece)

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 nature of 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 its argumentation semantics, propose a sound and complete algorithm for distributed query evaluation, and a number of variants for this algorithm.

SPEAKER'S HOMEPAGE: http://www.ics.forth.gr/~antoniou/

CURRICULUM VITAE: 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 ICT 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 the web and ambient intelligence. 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. Since 2008 he is member of the ECCAI Board.

CONTACT PERSON: Werner Nutt (nutt AT inf.unibz.it)