Deductive Computing over Knowledge Bases: Prolog and Datalog

Knowledge representation (KR) is actually more than representation: It involves also inference, namely inference of “new” knowledge, i.e. new facts. Logic programming is a suitable KR medium, but more often than not discussions on this programming paradigm focus on aspects other than KR. In this paper, I elaborate on the general theory of logic programming and give the essentials of two of its main implementations, to wit, Prolog and Datalog, from the viewpoint of deductive computing over knowledge bases, which includes deductive programming

Enhancing Undergraduate AI Courses through Machine Learning Projects

It is generally recognized that an undergraduate introductory Artificial Intelligence course is challenging to teach. This is, in part, due to the diverse and seemingly disconnected core topics that are typically covered. The paper presents work funded by the National Science Foundation to address this problem and to enhance the student learning experience in the course. Our work involves the development of an adaptable framework for the presentation of core AI topics through a unifying theme of machine learning. A suite of hands-on semester-long projects are developed, each involving the design and implementation of a learning system that enhances a commonly-deployed application. The projects use machine learning as a unifying theme to tie together the core AI topics. In this paper, we will first provide an overview of our model and the projects being developed and will then present in some detail our experiences with one of the projects – Web User Profiling which we have used in our AI class

Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management

Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS), submitted 19th March 200

Description of GADEL

This article describes the first implementation of the GADEL system : a Genetic Algorithm for Default Logic. The goal of GADEL is to compute extensions in Reiter's default logic. It accepts every kind of finite propositional default theories and is based on evolutionary principles of Genetic Algorithms. Its first experimental results on certain instances of the problem show that this new approach of the problem can be successful.Comment: System Descriptions and Demonstrations at Nonmonotonic Reasoning Workshop, 2000 6 pages, 2 figures, 5 table