Satisfiability is quasilinear complete in NQL

Considered are the classes QL (quasilinear) and NQL (nondet quasllmear) of all those problems that can be solved by deterministic (nondetermlnlsttc, respectively) Turmg machines in time O(n(log n) ~) for some k Effloent algorithms have time bounds of th~s type, it is argued. Many of the "exhausUve search" type problems such as satlsflablhty and colorabdlty are complete in NQL with respect to reductions that take O(n(log n) k) steps This lmphes that QL = NQL iff satisfiabdlty is m QL CR CATEGORIES: 5.2

Navigating the information landscape

Preprint of column segment to be published in Serials Librarian 61(3), 2011.This article explores the tension between the structures by which the library organises and presents information, and the ways in which students and researchers access, use and conceptualise knowledge. I suggest that while knowledge structures are vital to learning and research, an overemphasis on structurality is mistaken, and can lead to an inappropriately positivist approach which impedes the research mission. The article examines various metaphoric ways of negotiating meaning and navigating information structures, and of crossing the threshold of structuralit

A Static Analyzer for Large Safety-Critical Software

We show that abstract interpretation-based static program analysis can be made efficient and precise enough to formally verify a class of properties for a family of large programs with few or no false alarms. This is achieved by refinement of a general purpose static analyzer and later adaptation to particular programs of the family by the end-user through parametrization. This is applied to the proof of soundness of data manipulation operations at the machine level for periodic synchronous safety critical embedded software. The main novelties are the design principle of static analyzers by refinement and adaptation through parametrization, the symbolic manipulation of expressions to improve the precision of abstract transfer functions, the octagon, ellipsoid, and decision tree abstract domains, all with sound handling of rounding errors in floating point computations, widening strategies (with thresholds, delayed) and the automatic determination of the parameters (parametrized packing)

Heuristic Ranking in Tightly Coupled Probabilistic Description Logics

The Semantic Web effort has steadily been gaining traction in the recent years. In particular,Web search companies are recently realizing that their products need to evolve towards having richer semantic search capabilities. Description logics (DLs) have been adopted as the formal underpinnings for Semantic Web languages used in describing ontologies. Reasoning under uncertainty has recently taken a leading role in this arena, given the nature of data found on theWeb. In this paper, we present a probabilistic extension of the DL EL++ (which underlies the OWL2 EL profile) using Markov logic networks (MLNs) as probabilistic semantics. This extension is tightly coupled, meaning that probabilistic annotations in formulas can refer to objects in the ontology. We show that, even though the tightly coupled nature of our language means that many basic operations are data-intractable, we can leverage a sublanguage of MLNs that allows to rank the atomic consequences of an ontology relative to their probability values (called ranking queries) even when these values are not fully computed. We present an anytime algorithm to answer ranking queries, and provide an upper bound on the error that it incurs, as well as a criterion to decide when results are guaranteed to be correct.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2012