Reasoning Machines: Intro to AI
Reasoning Machines: Intro to AI
Lecture Details:
Date: Thursday Jan 5, 2017
Time: 19:30 to 22:00
Venue: ForwardLB, Jal el Dib
Attendance is free
Abstract:
A reasoner, or an inference engine, is used to infer/deduce a set of logical consequences from a set of facts. It has applications in many areas, mainly in, but not limited to, expert systems (emulating a human expert in a specific domain) and business rules management systems (used to manage and execute policies and actions defined by non-technical users).
The first part of this lecture will introduce the theoretical foundations of reasoners, starting from ancient (Greek) logic and ending with propositional and first-order logic.
The second part of the lecture will introduce:
1) The basics of automated reasoning, using Prolog, which is a declarative programming language based on first-order logic, as a use case, and
2) Ontologies and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is part of the W3C's Semantic Web technology stack, that is used to define rich and complex knowledge.
Prerequisites:
- Basic understanding of Algorithms and Computer Programming
- Basic understanding of Boolean Algebra
- Familiarity with XML
About the Speaker:
Firas al-Khalil is a postdoctoral researcher at the Governance, Risk, and Compliance Technology Center, Cork, Ireland.
Firas obtained his M.E. in Software Engineering from the Antonine University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of French Polynesia. His research interests include database security and access control, and semantic technologies.