Michael Gelfond

Last updated

Michael Gelfond is a Professor in Computer Sciences at Texas Tech University in the United States. He received a degree in mathematics from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Russia in 1974 and emigrated to the United States in 1978. Gelfond's research interests are in the areas of computational logic and knowledge representation. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, [1] and an Area Editor (in Knowledge Representation and Nonmonotonic Reasoning) of the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.

He, together with Vladimir Lifschitz, defined stable model semantics [2] for logic programs, which later became the theoretical foundation for Answer Set Programming, [3] a new declarative programming paradigm.

Related Research Articles

Knowledge representation and reasoning is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning, such as the application of rules or the relations of sets and subsets.

Logic programming is a programming, database and knowledge-representation and reasoning paradigm which is based on formal logic. A program, database or knowledge base in a logic programming language is a set of sentences in logical form, expressing facts and rules about some problem domain. Major logic programming language families include Prolog, Answer Set Programming (ASP) and Datalog. In all of these languages, rules are written in the form of clauses:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dana Scott</span> American logician (born 1932)

Dana Stewart Scott is an American logician who is the emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University; he is now retired and lives in Berkeley, California. His work on automata theory earned him the Turing Award in 1976, while his collaborative work with Christopher Strachey in the 1970s laid the foundations of modern approaches to the semantics of programming languages. He has worked also on modal logic, topology, and category theory.

In computer science, declarative programming is a programming paradigm—a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs—that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logic in computer science</span> Academic discipline

Logic in computer science covers the overlap between the field of logic and that of computer science. The topic can essentially be divided into three main areas:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaakko Hintikka</span> Finnish philosopher and logician

Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician. Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic.

Raymond Reiter was a Canadian computer scientist and logician. He was one of the founders of the field of non-monotonic reasoning with his work on default logic, model-based diagnosis, closed-world reasoning, and truth maintenance systems. He also contributed to the situation calculus.

Answer set programming (ASP) is a form of declarative programming oriented towards difficult search problems. It is based on the stable model semantics of logic programming. In ASP, search problems are reduced to computing stable models, and answer set solvers—programs for generating stable models—are used to perform search. The computational process employed in the design of many answer set solvers is an enhancement of the DPLL algorithm and, in principle, it always terminates.

Negation as failure is a non-monotonic inference rule in logic programming, used to derive from failure to derive . Note that can be different from the statement of the logical negation of , depending on the completeness of the inference algorithm and thus also on the formal logic system.

Patrick John Hayes FAAAI is a British computer scientist who lives and works in the United States. As of March 2006, he is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deborah McGuinness</span>

Deborah Louise McGuinness is an American computer scientist and researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). She is a professor of Computer, Cognitive and Web Sciences, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Constellation, a multidisciplinary research institution within RPI that focuses on the study of theories, methods and applications of the World Wide Web. Her fields of expertise include interdisciplinary data integration, artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, explanation, and trust.

The concept of a stable model, or answer set, is used to define a declarative semantics for logic programs with negation as failure. This is one of several standard approaches to the meaning of negation in logic programming, along with program completion and the well-founded semantics. The stable model semantics is the basis of answer set programming.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moshe Vardi</span> Israeli mathematicien and computer scientist

Moshe Ya'akov Vardi is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, United States. and a faculty advisor for the Ken Kennedy Institute. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite model theory, knowledge of multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is an expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge (logic), and theoretical computer science.

Vladimir Lifschitz is the Gottesman Family Centennial Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a degree in mathematics from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Russia in 1971 and emigrated to the United States in 1976. Lifschitz's research interests are in the areas of computational logic and knowledge representation. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, and an Editorial Advisor of the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.

In computer science, an action language is a language for specifying state transition systems, and is commonly used to create formal models of the effects of actions on the world. Action languages are commonly used in the artificial intelligence and robotics domains, where they describe how actions affect the states of systems over time, and may be used for automated planning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">François Fages</span>

François Fages is a French computer scientist known for contributions in the areas of unification theory, rule-based modelling, logic programming, concurrent constraint logic programming, computational biology and systems biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francesca Rossi</span> Italian computer scientist

Francesca Rossi is an Italian computer scientist, currently working at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab as an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader.

Victor Witold Marek, formerly Wiktor Witold Marek known as Witek Marek is a Polish mathematician and computer scientist working in the fields of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic.

Michael Genesereth is an American logician and computer scientist, who is most known for his work on computational logic and applications of that work in enterprise management, computational law, and general game playing. Genesereth is professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and a professor by courtesy in the Stanford Law School. His 1987 textbook on Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence remains one of the key references on symbolic artificial intelligence. He is the author of the influential Game Description Language (GDL) and Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF), the latter of which led to the ISO Common Logic standard.

Logic programming is a programming paradigm that includes languages based on formal logic, including Datalog and Prolog. This article describes the syntax and semantics of the purely declarative subset of these languages. Confusingly, the name "logic programming" also refers to a specific programming language that roughly corresponds to the declarative subset of Prolog. Unfortunately, the term must be used in both senses in this article.

References

  1. List of AAAI Fellows on the AAAI website
  2. Michael Gelfond, Vladimir Lifschitz: The Stable Model Semantics for Logic Programming. ICLP/SLP 1988: 1070-1080
  3. Victor Marek and Miroslaw Truszczynski. Stable models and an alternative logic programming paradigm. In The Logic Programming Paradigm: a 25-Year Perspective, pages 375-398. Springer Verlag, 1999