Unifying Logic and Probability: A New Dawn for AI?

Abstract. Logic and probability theory are two of the most important branches of mathematics and each has played a significant role in artificial intelligence (AI) research. Beginning with Leibniz, scholars have attempted to unify logic and probability. For "classical" AI, based largely on first-order logic, the purpose of such a unification is to handle uncertainty and facilitate learning from real data; for "modern" AI, based largely on probability theory, the purpose is to acquire formal languages with sufficient expressive power to handle complex domains and incorporate prior knowledge. This paper provides a brief summary of an invited talk describing efforts in these directions, focusing in particular on open-universe probability models that allow for uncertainty about the existence and identity of objects

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

A Call to Arms: Revisiting Database Design

Good database design is crucial to obtain a sound, consistent database, and - in turn - good database design methodologies are the best way to achieve the right design. These methodologies are taught to most Computer Science undergraduates, as part of any Introduction to Database class. They can be considered part of the "canon", and indeed, the overall approach to database design has been unchanged for years. Moreover, none of the major database research assessments identify database design as a strategic research direction. Should we conclude that database design is a solved problem? Our thesis is that database design remains a critical unsolved problem. Hence, it should be the subject of more research. Our starting point is the observation that traditional database design is not used in practice - and if it were used it would result in designs that are not well adapted to current environments. In short, database design has failed to keep up with the times. In this paper, we put forth arguments to support our viewpoint, analyze the root causes of this situation and suggest some avenues of research.Comment: Removed spurious column break. Nothing else was change

Epistemological vs. Ontological Relationalism in Quantum Mechanics: Relativism or Realism?

In this paper we investigate the history of relationalism and its present use in some interpretations of quantum mechanics. In the first part of this article we will provide a conceptual analysis of the relation between substantivalism, relationalism and relativism in the history of both physics and philosophy. In the second part, we will address some relational interpretations of quantum mechanics, namely, Bohr's relational approach, the modal interpretation by Kochen, the perspectival modal version by Bene and Dieks and the relational interpretation by Rovelli. We will argue that all these interpretations ground their understanding of relations in epistemological terms. By taking into account the analysis on the first part of our work, we intend to highlight the fact that there is a different possibility for understanding quantum mechanics in relational terms which has not been yet considered within the foundational literature. This possibility is to consider relations in (non-relativist) ontological terms. We will argue that such an understanding might be capable of providing a novel approach to the problem of representing what quantum mechanics is really talking about.Comment: Welcome

Teaching persuasive argument essay writing to adolescent English language learners through the Reading to Learn approach

A persistent achievement gap exists between the steadily growing population of adolescent English language learners (ELLs) in K-12 public schools and their native English-speaking peers. Unsurprisingly, the underachievement of this population of students is linked to an excessively high dropout rate among adolescent ELLs across the nation. Current research highlights the critical need for instructional approaches that support these learners in developing academic English and advanced literacy practices. Through research-based effective instructional practices that support the attainment of advanced literacy practices, these culturally and linguistically diverse learners are afforded access to post-secondary educational and career opportunities from which they are otherwise excluded. A growing body of research suggests that genre-based pedagogy is an effective instructional approach for apprenticing adolescent ELLs into academically-valued writing practices across school-based genres. Drawing on this research, this study employed a pretest/posttest design to investigate the effect of the genre-based Reading to Learn approach, grounded in systemic functional linguistics, on adolescent ELLs’ competency in writing academically successful persuasive argument essays. Following an ethnographic approach, this study also investigated the way that the participants perceived the effects of the Reading to Learn approach on their development as a second language writers. Finally, this study aimed to richly describe the challenges of designing and implementing an instructional intervention using the Reading to Learn approach in an urban public high school English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. Findings indicate that the Reading to Learn approach had a significant effect on the participants’ competency for writing academically-valued persuasive argument essays. Despite challenges in designing and implementing an instructional intervention using the Reading to Learn approach, these findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that suggests that this genre-based instructional framework may support adolescent ELLs’ progress toward the development of advanced literacy practices

BoxE: A Box Embedding Model for Knowledge Base Completion

Knowledge base completion (KBC) aims to automatically infer missing facts by exploiting information already present in a knowledge base (KB). A promising approach for KBC is to embed knowledge into latent spaces and make predictions from learned embeddings. However, existing embedding models are subject to at least one of the following limitations: (1) theoretical inexpressivity, (2) lack of support for prominent inference patterns (e.g., hierarchies), (3) lack of support for KBC over higher-arity relations, and (4) lack of support for incorporating logical rules. Here, we propose a spatio-translational embedding model, called BoxE, that simultaneously addresses all these limitations. BoxE embeds entities as points, and relations as a set of hyper-rectangles (or boxes), which spatially characterize basic logical properties. This seemingly simple abstraction yields a fully expressive model offering a natural encoding for many desired logical properties. BoxE can both capture and inject rules from rich classes of rule languages, going well beyond individual inference patterns. By design, BoxE naturally applies to higher-arity KBs. We conduct a detailed experimental analysis, and show that BoxE achieves state-of-the-art performance, both on benchmark knowledge graphs and on more general KBs, and we empirically show the power of integrating logical rules.Comment: Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Conference on Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020). Code and data available at: http://www.github.com/ralphabb/Box