ICCL Summer School 'Reasoning', September 13 - 26, 2015, Dresden

From International Center for Computational Logic


Some of the lecture slides are online now. You can find them under the lectures' descriptions.


In September 2015 we organize a summer school, which, in the second week, will be held at the same time as the German AI conference. The conference and the summer school will be coupled. A participation in the summer school includes the free participation in the AI conference.

We encourage participants of the summer school to submit own research work to the German AI conference or to one of their workshops.

As in the past summer schools at TU Dresden in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 2010 and 2013 people from distinct, but communicating communities will gather in an informal and friendly atmosphere. This two-week event is aimed at graduate students, researchers and practitioners.

Topic

The topic of this year's summer school is Reasoning

Dates

  • Arrival: 13th of September
  • Registration: 14th of September
  • Departure: 26th of September


Venue

The summer school is held at the Computer Science Faculty building of Technische Universität Dresden, Nöthnitzer Straße 46, Dresden-Räcknitz .


How to reach us

  • Directions [1]
  • Annotated satellite map [2]


Public Transport

Dresden provides many nice places to be, such that you might want to use public transport.

For the participants, we can provide tickets for public transport during the summer school (it is valid for the two weeks, from 13. to 26.September) for 29 EUR.

Tickets without discount have the following price: Single Ticket: 2,20 EUR, Four Tickets: 8 EUR, Day Ticket: 6 EUR, Week Ticket: 21 EUR

Faculty of computer science.


Weather Information

In this period of the year, the average temperature at daytime in Dresden will be about 24 degrees. It may be windy; sometimes it rains. However, if there is a longer raining period, the maximum temperature might decrease to about 15 degrees. This year the weather is rather hot. To be on the save side, please check [3].


Computing Facilities

  • We provide access to wireless networking in the ground floor of the Computer Science Faculty building during the Summer School. If you don't have a notebook with wireless networking, we can provide you a login account for the department computing center.
  • You will receive your personal login name and password as well as a short explanation during the registration.
  • Please note, that certain internet services (e. g. SMTP) might not be available due to the security policies of our university. To access these services, we suggest you the usage of a VPN service of your university.
  • Please note we will not provide any facilities or services for personal printing.

Term Rewriting Systems by Franz Baader (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)

Term rewriting is an important branch of theoretical computer science which combines elements of logic and mathematics. In fact, term rewriting systems can be used to compute in structures that are defined by equations. They are thus an important tool in automated deduction, algebraic specification, and functional programming. The course introduces important properties such as termination and confluence of term rewriting systems, shows methods for checking termination and confluence, and finally describes how Knuth-Bendix completion can (sometimes) be used to make non-confluent term rewriting systems confluent.

Model Checking by Christel Baier (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)

Markov chains (MC) and Markov decision processes (MDP) are widely used as operational models for the quantitative system analysis. They can be understood as transition systems augmented with distributions for the states (in MC) or state-action pairs (in MDPs) to specify the probabilities for the successor states. Additionally one might add weight functions for modeling accumulated costs or rewards earned along path fragments to represent e.g. the energy consumption, the penality to be paid for missed deadlines, the gain for completing tasks successfully or the degree of the achieved utility. The tutorial will introduce the main features of discrete-time, finite-state Markovian models (MC and MDP) and their quantitative analysis against temporal logic specifications. The first part will present the basic princi- ples of the automata-based approach for linear temporal logic (LTL) and probabilistic computation tree logic (PCTL), including a summary of techniques that have been proposed to tackle the state-explosion problem. The second part of the tutorial will present algorithms for dealing with fairness assumptions and computing conditional probabilities and quantiles.

Human Reasoning by Emmanuelle Dietz, Steffen Hölldobler, Marco Ragni (Technische Universität Dresden, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Germany)

Recently, the lecturers have introduced a new approach to model human reasoning based on logic programming employing as techniques model generation, weak completion semantics and abduction under the three-valued Lukasiewicz logic. In the course we will present the approach in detail, discuss its relation to well-founded semantics, and show how it can be applied to model important phenomena of human reasoning such as the suppression and the selection task as well as the belief-bias effect. We discuss novel extensions of abduction and present a connectionist realization.

Abstract Argumentation – Reasoning, Expressiveness and its Connection to Answer Set Programming by Sarah Alice Gaggl (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)

Argumentation is one of the major fields in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR). Nowadays, the concept of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) is one of the most popular approaches to capture certain aspects of argumentation. This very simple yet expressive model has been introduced by Phan Minh Dung in 1995. Arguments and a binary “attack” relation between them, denoting conflicts, are the only components one needs for the representation of a wide range of problems and the reasoning therein. Nowadays numerous semantics exist to solve the inherent conflicts between the arguments by selecting sets of “acceptable” arguments. Depending on the application, acceptability is defined in different ways. Some semantics are based on the idea to defend arguments against attacks, while others treat arguments like different choices and the solutions stand for consistent sets of arguments. In this course we will first focus on the expressiveness of AFs, in particular we will study if, and under which conditions, a given set of arguments can be accepted at all in an AF under a given semantics. Furthermore, we will analyze different notions of equivalences for AFs, for example when two different AFs posses the same solutions under a semantics, even if we apply modifications to them. Finally we will observe the connection between answer set programming (ASP) and AFs. AA_Gaggl_2015slides1+2.pdf, AA_Gaggl_2015slides3.pdf, AA_Gaggl_2015slides4.pdf, AA_Gaggl_2015slides5.pdf

SAT Solving by Steffen Hölldobler, Norbert Manthey (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)

Satisfiability testing (SAT) is applied in a wide range of applications, for example hardware model checking, planning, periodic event scheduling or bio informatics. The reason for solving many combinatorial problems with the same reasoning system is the strength of the so-called SAT solvers that have been improved significantly about two decades ago and received much attention afterwards. This course briefly introduces why modern SAT solvers are so strong and de- tails some of the significant contributions in the area. The main focus of the course is the discussion of techniques that improved the solvers. Additionally, propositional proof theory is related to modern solvers, and the solvers major deduction technique resolution will be discussed in more detail, because the power of the solvers relies on the reasoning power. Finally, an overview on related applications is given to introduce ways how SAT solvers can be used to solve combinatorial problems.

OWL 2 Profiles: An Introduction to Lightweight Ontology Languages by Markus Krötzsch (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)

This course gives an extended introduction to the lightweight profiles OWL EL, OWL QL, and OWL RL of the Web Ontology Language OWL. The three ontology language standards are sublanguages of OWL DL that are restricted in ways that significantly simplify ontological reasoning. Compared to OWL DL as a whole, reasoning algorithms for the OWL profiles show higher performance, are easier to implement, and can scale to larger amounts of data. Since ontological reasoning is of great importance for designing and deploying OWL ontologies, the profiles are highly attractive for many applications. These advantages come at a price: various modelling features of OWL are not available in all or some of the OWL profiles. Moreover, the profiles are mutually incomparable in the sense that each of them offers a combination of features that is available in none of the others. This chapter provides an overview of these differences and explains why some of them are essential to retain the desired properties. To this end, we recall the relationship between OWL and description logics (DLs), and show how each of the profiles is typically treated in reasoning algorithms.

Query Answering under Existential Rules by Sebastian Rudolph (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)

The course focuses on a problem called ontological query answering, which consists in querying data while taking general domain knowledge (an ontology) into account. The ontology is assumed to be expressed via a set of existential rules (which have been known under many different names like tuple-generating dependencies, Datalog+/-, and forall-exists-rules). As the general problem is undecidable, restrictions need to be imposed to guarantee decidability. Over the last years, a lot of ever more expressive such decidable existential rule fragments have been identified. We will provide an overview of these fragments, relate them to general priciples of decidability, and discuss the different algorithmic approaches to query answering that they give rise to.


Answer Set Programming by Torsten Schaub (Universität Potsdam, Germany)

The tutorial aims at acquainting the participant with ASP’s modeling and solving methodology, enabling her/him to independent problem solving using ASP systems. To this end, the tutorial starts with an introduction to the essential formal concepts of ASP, needed for understanding its semantics and solving technology. In fact, ASP solving rests on two major components: A grounder turning specifications in ASP’s modeling language into propositional logic programs and a solver computing a requested number of answer sets of the given program. Building on the aforementioned formal concepts, we provide a characterization of ASP’s inference schemes that are in turn mapped into algorithms relying on advanced Boolean Constraint technology. We illustrate this technology through the ASP solver clasp, developed at the University of Potsdam, and winning first places at international ASP, CASC, MISC, PB, and SAT competitions. Similarly, ASP’s grounding inferences are discussed in conjunction with (deductive) database techniques. The remainder of the tutorial is dedicated to applying ASP, involving an introduction to ASP’s modeling language, its solving methodology, and advanced techniques fostering scalability. The latter is illustrated via some real-world applications, taken from bio-informatics.

The summer school Reasoning is a platform for knowledge transfer within a very rapid increasing research community in the field of Computational Logic. We will offer introductory courses covering the fundamentals of reasoning, courses at advanced levels, as well as applied courses dedicated to specialized topics and the state of the art. All lecturers are leading researchers in their field and have been awarded prizes. For the participants of the summer school, the participation at the 38th German AI conference, also held in Dresden, is free of charge.

Registration

If you still want to register for the ICCL Summer School 2015 please do so personally on Monday morning, 14.9.2015. The online registration is closed now.

Admission Requirements

The summer school is for master and phd students who work in a discipline which is relevant for the summer school. However, excellent bachelor students are also approved.

Fees

We ask for a participation fee

  • Early Bird Registration (Deadline extended to 29.Juli 2015)
    • Students: 200 EUR
    • Academic 300 EUR
    • Others 500 EUR


  • Late Registration
    • Students: 300 EUR
    • Academic 450 EUR
    • Others 900 EUR


Please pay this summer school fee cash at the day of your arrival. On request, you may also make a bank transfer. Any fees arising for the transfer must be paid by you and cannot be deducted from the registration fee.

If belonging to the university sector, you have to provide some respective evidence when paying the fees at the check-in (e. g. student card, web page at a university etc.). Students must present a proof of their status (student id in case of a bachelor, master or diplom student; scholarship certificate in case of PhD students) upon arrival at the summer shool or conference.

Grants

A limited number of grants for students and university employees will be available, which includes a waiver of the participation fee.

Please indicate in your application, if the only possibility for you to participate is via a grant. Applications for grants must include an estimate of travel costs (to be mentioned in the respective part of the online registration form).

The deadline for the application for this grant is 11.05.2015.

Note, we might provide the opportunity to allow participants of the summer school to give short presentations about their current work. If you are willing to give such a presentation, please give the according information in the registration form.

The registration is on Monday, 14.9. between 8 and 10:20 in room APB05 and after that at Susan Gierth's office in APB2002. In case you can't come during these times, you can contact her by email: susann.gierth@tu-dresden.de

First Week

   Sunday 
 September 13 
 Monday 
 September 14 
 Tuesday 
 September 15 
 Wednesday 
 September 16 
 Thursday 
 September 17 
 Friday 
 September 18 
 Saturday 
 September 19 
   9:00 - 10:00   Opening Baier Gaggl Gaggl Baader Excursion
10:20 - 11:20   HM Baier DHR DHR Baader Excursion
11:40 - 12:40   DHR Baier Excursion DHR Baader Excursion
14:40 - 15:40   Gaggl Gaggl Excursion Baader free Excursion
16:00 - 17:00   Gaggl DHR Excursion Baader free Excursion
Evening       Excursion     Excursion


Second Week

   Sunday 
 September 20 
 Monday 
 September 21 
 Tuesday 
 September 22 
 Wednesday 
 September 23 
 Thursday 
 September 24 
 Friday 
 September 25 
 Saturday 
 September 26 
   9:00 - 10:00   Schaub Rudolph KI 2015 KI 2015 KI 2015  
10:20 - 11:20   Schaub Rudolph KI 2015  HM (starts 10:40)   HM (starts 10:40)   
11:40 - 12.40   Krötzsch Schaub KI 2015 HM HM  
14.40 - 15.40   Krötzsch Schaub KI 2015 (starts at 14:00) KI 2015 KI 2015  
16.00 - 17.00   Krötzsch free KI 2015 KI 2015  
Evening     Reception   Dinner    


HM = Hölldobler, Manthey

DHR = Dietz, Hölldobler, Ragni

We plan to do the following social activities during the summer school. Yet, the details are not fixed.

  • Walking City Tour (Tuesday, 15.9.)
  • Excursion to Pirna (Wednesday, 16.9.)
  • Excursion to Saxon Switzerland (Saturday, 19.9.)
  • Reception (together with KI 2015, Tuesday, 22.9.)
  • Green Vault (Tuesday, 22.9., 16:15 - 17:15)
  • Dinner at Eckberg Castle (Thursday, 24.9. for grant holders, academic and others; students will given free tickets if available) . How to get there.

(From main station it takes about 30 minutes with the tram number 11.)

The Dinner at Eckberg Castle has the following menu:

  • Thin slices of veal saddle marinated with boletus Melon chutney, raspberry dressing
    • (vegetarian: Fresh salad with boletus, Melon chutney, raspberry dressing )
  • Fried chicken breast sweet potato puree, young spinach melted tomatoes
    • (vegetarian: Mixed vegetables with sweet potato puree, young spinach, melted tomatoes )
  • Marinated pineapple chocolate tartlet and sorbet


Accomodation

Some hotels and apartment agencies offer accommodation to participants.

All suggested places are conveniently connected by public transportation to the summer school and workshop venue.

Please act fast, because it´s very difficult to find rooms in Dresden in this period of the year. Here, we provide a list of well located and affordable accommodation.


Living Expenses

  • Accommodation: The costs for accommodation depend on the place, where you book a room and can be found on the web pages linked from the page above.
  • Living: For food and living no exact information can be given as this is too individual. A calculation for Saxon law amounts to 24 EUR per day.
  • Public transportation: If you want to use public transports, please see Info and Venue for the ticket fares and possibilities.
  • Cultural program: We don't charge any addition for our cultural program. Only for some single events you may need some little money for food etc. as mentioned on the event information pages.
  • Per diems: The per diems rates for Germany given by the European Commission amount to 208 EUR. These rates include all arising costs as mentioned above.


Child Care

A flexible child care is offered to participants of congresses or other events taking place at the Technische Universität Dresden. It gives you the possibility to take your children to Dresden and leave them under care of educated staff, when attending lectures.

For more information, please contact:

Campusbüro Uni mit Kind

George-Bähr-Straße 1b

Tel./Fax: +49-351-463-32666 / -32667

E-mail: campusbuero@tu-dresden.de

German web page

Chair of the Summer School Steffen Hölldobler

Organizers of the Summer School Emmanuelle Dietz, Julia Koppenhagen, Norbert Manthey