Multi-Context Reasoning in Continuous Data-Flow Environments

The field of artificial intelligence, research on knowledge representation and reasoning has originated a large variety of formats, languages, and formalisms. Over the decades many different tools emerged to use these underlying concepts. Each one has been designed with some specific application in mind and are even used nowadays, where the internet is seen as a service to be sufficient for the age of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things. In that vision of a connected world, with these many different formalisms and systems, a formal way to uniformly exchange information, such as knowledge and belief is imperative. That alone is not enough, because even more systems get integrated into the online world and nowadays we are confronted with a huge amount of continuously flowing data. Therefore a solution is needed to both, allowing the integration of information and dynamic reaction to the data which is provided in such continuous data-flow environments. This work aims to present a unique and novel pair of formalisms to tackle these two important needs by proposing an abstract and general solution. We introduce and discuss reactive Multi-Context Systems (rMCS), which allow one to utilise different knowledge representation formalisms, so-called contexts which are represented as an abstract logic framework, and exchange their beliefs through bridge rules with other contexts. These multiple contexts need to mutually agree on a common set of beliefs, an equilibrium of belief sets. While different Multi-Context Systems already exist, they are only solving this agreement problem once and are neither considering external data streams, nor are they reasoning continuously over time. rMCS will do this by adding means of reacting to input streams and allowing the bridge rules to reason with this new information. In addition we propose two different kind of bridge rules, declarative ones to find a mutual agreement and operational ones for adapting the current knowledge for future computations. The second framework is more abstract and allows computations to happen in an asynchronous way. These asynchronous Multi-Context Systems are aimed at modelling and describing communication between contexts, with different levels of self-management and centralised management of communication and computation. In this thesis rMCS will be analysed with respect to usability, consistency management, and computational complexity, while we will show how asynchronous Multi-Context Systems can be used to capture the asynchronous ideas and how to model an rMCS with it. Finally we will show how rMCSs are positioned in the current world of stream reasoning and that it can capture currently used technologies and therefore allows one to seamlessly connect different systems of these kinds with each other. Further on this also shows that rMCSs are expressive enough to simulate the mechanics used by these systems to compute the corresponding results on its own as an alternative to already existing ones. For asynchronous Multi-Context Systems, we will discuss how to use them and that they are a very versatile tool to describe communication and asynchronous computation

Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline