Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Nonmonotonic logics---recent advances

Classical logic is monotonic: adding information never invalidates any derivations. Commonsense reasoning is different. Having to deal with incomplete information, it draws plausible conclusions based on the assumption that the world is "as expected". If new information invalidates that assumption, conclusions may have to be revised. Nonmonotonic logics were proposed in 1980s in to formalize commonsense reasoning. Over the years, they proved effective in formalizing many knowledge representation problems and led to a new computational paradigm of answer-set programming. The course will discuss recent advances in nonmonotonic logics: the emergence of the logics here-and-there, S4F and SW5 as underlying major non-monotonic formalisms; an algebraic approximation theory that offers an alternative foundation to nonmonotonicity; the concepts of strong and uniform equivalence, fundamental for the modular design of nonmonotonic knowledge bases; loop formulas connecting nonmonotonic systems with classical ones; and lastly, extensions of basic nonmonotonic formalisms to the first-order case.