Vienna Logic Day Lecture 2024
Recording - Beyond truth and falsehood: Logic as a Calculus of Events
The 2024 Vienna World Logic Day Lecture was held by Adnan Darwiche (UCLA).
Title
Beyond truth and falsehood: Logic as a Calculus of Events
Date: January 12, 2024
Time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 1pm GMT-3 | 5pm CET (Vienna)
This event took place online via Zoom with a livestream on the VCLA youtube channel @viennacenterforlogicandalg5604.
Moderators: Prof. Agata Ciabattoni, Prof. Stefan Szeider
Abstract
Logic is widely viewed as a calculus of truth and falsehood. However, over the last few decades, the role of logic in AI has been mostly as a calculus of events, which has been effectively and profoundly employed in tasks such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning and explainable AI. In this talk, I will discuss some of the fundamental insights, techniques and tools that have emerged from this broader role of logic, and will provide concrete examples of how they enabled the development of state-of-the-art AI systems that transcend the traditional scope of logic.
About the speaker
Adnan Darwiche is a professor and former chairman of the computer science department at UCLA. He directs the automated reasoning group which focuses on the theory and practice of probabilistic and logical reasoning, and their applications to machine learning and explainable AI. His group is responsible for publicly releasing a number of high profile reasoning systems (http://reasoning.cs.ucla.edu/). Professor Darwiche is a Fellow of AAAI and ACM, a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), and author of “Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks,” by Cambridge University Press, 2009. Professor Darwiche founded the “Beyond NP” initiative in 2015 (http: //beyondnp.org/). Many of his works are featured at https://youtube.com/@UCLA.Reasoning.
Please register for this zoom webinar here.
Vienna Logic Day Lecture 2023
Recording - Logic and argumentation for the 21st century
The 2023 Vienna World Logic Day Lecture was held by Dov Gabbay (King’s College London and University of Luxembourg).
Title
Logic and argumentation for the 21st century
Date: January 14, 2023
Time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 1pm GMT-3 | 5pm CET (Vienna)
This event took place online via Zoom with a livestream on the VCLA youtube channel @viennacenterforlogicandalg5604.
Moderators: Prof. Agata Ciabattoni, Prof. Stefan Szeider
The 2023 Vienna World Logic Day Lecture was held by Dov Gabbay (King’s College London and University of Luxembourg).
Title
Logic and argumentation for the 21st century
Date: January 14, 2023
Time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 1pm GMT-3 | 5pm CET (Vienna)
This event took place online via Zoom with a livestream on the VCLA youtube channel @viennacenterforlogicandalg5604.
Moderators: Prof. Agata Ciabattoni, Prof. Stefan Szeider
Abstract
The reasoning patterns and technological advances in the 21st century used in artificial intelligence, social media, and political behavior present a challenge to current applied logic and argumentation.
The old logic has to adapt, evolve, or die.
This lecture will show (through a case study) how to adapt intuitionistic and classical logics to an algorithmic version capable of handling reasoning failures, fallacies, bias, alternative truth, and other problems.
We shall use a combination of technical tools developed in the past 40 years.
Vienna Logic Day Lecture 2022
Recording
The 2022 Vienna World Logic Day Lecture on January 2022 was held by Moshe Y. Vardi (Rice University, Texas).
Title
From Greek Paradoxes to Political Paradoxes
From Greek Paradoxes to Political Paradoxes
Abstract
The ancient Greeks invented logic, as a tool to discover eternal truths. They also invented paradoxes, as a tool to sharpen the mind. Famous Greek paradoxes are the Liar’s Paradox, Zeno’s Paradox, and the Sand-Heap Paradox. The Liar’s Paradox led, at the start of the 20th Century, to a foundational crisis of mathematics, which led to the development of computability theory in the 1930s, as well as the unresolvable mathematical conundrum of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.
Computing technology, which also emerged in the 1930s, ultimately led, at the start of the 21 Century, to the emergence of social media. Today, our society is struggling with the adverse societal effects of social media. These adverse effects can also be understood in terms of the Greek paradoxes, as well as their political versions, known as the Popperian Paradoxes. In fact, one can say that the Greek myths of Prometheus and Pandora already told us that technology does not come without adverse consequences, which is why John von Neumann, one of the most prominent computing pioneers, asked in 1955, “Can we survive technology?”
About the Speaker
Short Bio
Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor, Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, where he is leading an Initiative on Technology, Culture, and Society.
His interests focus on automated reasoning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence with broad applications to computer science, including machine learning, database theory, computational-complexity theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is also a Faculty Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
Vienna Logic Day Lecture 2021
The first Vienna Logic Day Lecture at VCLA was an online event offering the possibility for a worldwide participation.
Date: January 14, 2021
Time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 1pm GMT-3 | 5pm CET (Vienna)
Speaker
Prof. Georg Gottlob
(University of Oxford, TU Wien)
Title
Knowledge Processing, Logic, and the Future of AI
Moderators
Prof. Agata Ciabattoni
Prof. Stefan Szeider
Recording is also available on the VCLA Youtube channel here
Presentation slides are available here
Knowledge Processing, Logic, and the Future of AI
Abstract
Nowadays, when people speak about AI, they usually mean machine learning. Machine learning, in particular, deep learning, is a powerful method for generating a type of knowledge that could be classified as self-learned knowledge.
We humans, on the other hand, make heavy use of two types of knowledge: (i) self-learned knowledge and (ii) transferable knowledge learned or generated by others. If you read this and/or attend the talk, this is mainly because of this second type of Knowledge.
In this talk, I will argue that the combination of both types of knowledge is needed for more powerful and fair automated decision making or decision support, and thus for the next level of AI. I will discuss various requirements for reasoning formalisms towards this purpose. After discussing logical languages for knowledge-representation and reasoning, I will briefly introduce the VADALOG system developed at Oxford and give an outlook on my recent project RAISON DATA funded by the Royal Society.
About the speaker
Vienna Logic Day Lecture 2022
Short Bio
Georg Gottlob is a Royal Society Research Professor and a Professor of Informatics at Oxford University and at TU Wien. At Oxford he is a Fellow of St John’s College.
His interests include knowledge representation, logic and complexity, and database and Web querying.
Prof. Gottlob received various awards, among which the Wittgenstein Award (Austrian National Science Fund (FWF)) and the Ada Lovelace Medal (UK).
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW), the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and the Academia Europaea. He is also an ACM Fellow and an EURAI Fellow (European Association for Artificial Intelligence).
He was a founder of Lixto, a company specialised in semi-automatic web data extraction which was acquired by McKinsey in 2013. Gottlob was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator’s Grant for the project “DIADEM: Domain-centric Intelligent Automated Data Extraction Methodology“. Based on the results of this project, he co-founded Wrapidity Ltd, a company that specialised in fully automated web data extraction, which was acquired in 2016 by Meltwater. He recently co-founded DeepReason.ai, which puts the logic-based VADALOG system into practice and applies it with banks and other corporate customers.
Last but not least, Georg Gottlob is the member of the international advisory board of Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms, and current speaker of LogiCS doctoral college: Logical Methods in Computer Science, where PhD positions are funded by Austrian National Science Fund (FWF).
Even though Georg Gottlob describes himself as “a passionate theoretician who is spending nights proving theorem, or as least trying to”, he has been together with his colleagues in Vienna and Oxford deploying his research-based knowledge on practically relevant problems.
Georg Gottlob´s pioneering contributions to the theory, language design, algorithms, and systems in Web data extraction resulted not only in new methods which are reunifying the artificial intelligence (AI) and database techniques, but they also contributed to successful spin-offs (Lixto, Wrapidity) of research projects funded by European Research Council (ERC), thus creating technological transfer, jobs, and permanently impacting not only the local livelihoods but also the international data intelligence industry.
Professor Gottlob was responsible for building up a strong research group on theoretical foundations of databases and AI at TU Wien, part of Logic and Computation Institute of Faculty of Informatics. After leaving Austria in 2006 to take on his appointment in Oxford, he was trusted with the specific mission to build a similar database theory group also abroad. At TU Wien, Gottlob has helped in forming the Algorithms and Complexity Group led by Gottlob´s co-speaker in LogiCS doctoral programm, Professor Stefan Szeider (TU Wien) co-chair and founder of Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms.
While in Oxford, he has always kept very strong ties with TU Wien, and has intensively collaborated with Professor Pichler as well as with his former student, head of the Logic and Computation Institute, Professor Thomas Eiter, an EurAI Fellow.