Grants and Stays

As a key-important activity in researching I have obtained some grants and made stays in other research institutions.

Grants

Stays

Logic and Social Choice Theory

I just finished an introduction to social choice theory as the formal study of mechanisms for collective decision making. The article presents all the required background to start in this discipline. I reached this paper through the website of UVA and I consider that the concepts presented in the paper could be applied to a lot of use cases, for instance matchmaking of organizations and public contracts or maybe to mediation in Linked Data. Now I am also very interested in works related to “The Wisdom of Crowds” and, on the best of my knowledge, this kind of research and tools can help to validate the results generated by a crowd. There are also other relevant concepts and definitions I did not know (in this context) such as: dictatorship, liberalism, positive responsiveness or manipulation among others . Furthermore, author presents somo logic concepts that have emerged to support social choice theory with a formal syntax and semantics. Thus there are approches based on FOL, HOL and others trying to formalize the underlying concepts of this theory. I would like to highlight the “Doctrinal Paradox” that makes me feel uncomfortable with existing methods of judging being that using a “premise-based procedure” or a “conclusion-based procedure” to get a decision, the final result can change although both procedures are correct!

If you are interested in this kind of work or research, you can follow the Autumm Course about Computational Social Choice teached by Ulle Endriss as part of a Logics master.

Keep in touch!

 

Re-reasoning starting…

Last days I have read a lot of papers about different topics such as FOL, inference, artificial intelligence, large scale reasoning, rule engines, etc. I have collected all these references in ROCAS wiki with the objective of saving all relevant works that can help me to finally develop our semantic reasoner for large datasets.

This afternoon I have found a paper entitled as “Making Web-Scale Semantic Reasoning More Service- Oriented: The Large Knowledge Collider” that presents the whole architecture of the well-know project LarKc, in some sense the ROCAS project was inspired by this European project but with a restricted scope and different objectives. This paper has two main points for me:

  1. One of the authors is Zhisheng Huang who helped me in 2004 to use his Distributed Logic Programming system to animate humanoids when I was developing my final degree project to get the Bachelor Degree.
  2. From a research point of view, authors present a compilation of works made during the execution of the LarKc project that should be relevant to ROCAS. It is not a research paper but a good summary of this project.

This is a short post but I want to highlight that the world is small enough to meet same people (in this case researchers) again and again! It is incredible! 🙂

Finally, I would also like to report my first progresses in the development. I have deployed a job in Hadoop to perform the classical graph-algorithm “Breadth-First Search”, this is one of the tries I am thinking about for performing reasoning tasks…the other approches can be summarized:

  1. Distribute Jena rule engine (reusing source code)
  2. Develop from scratch the typical backward chain engine using unification and resolution
  3. Mix of 1 and 2 to avoid parsing rules, matching triples, etc.
  4. Build a graph (rules in backward chain can be shown as an AND/OR tree) and try to infer new facts using unification and search.

Let’s rock it!

HPC-Europe2 visiting

In February I made an application to the HPC-Europa2 Transnational Access programme and I finally got a grant that enabled the opportunity of using the SARA infrastructure to test some algorithms. Thanks to the Professor Maarten de Rijke I could select the University of Amsterdam as host so…Now I am here for 6 weeks at the University of Amsterdam in the Institute for Informatics and more specifically in the Intelligent Systems Lab. I am very excited with this opportunity and I will do my best to get a good version of our reasoning prototype. Besides I would like to start a fruitful collaboration between people in this lab and our research group through publications, projects or whatever.

I would also like to thank all the administrative staff of UVA their time and consideration. When I arrived, last Thursday, in 15 minutes I had a visiting card, a desktop and WI-FI connection and a great sight…

I will keep you informed!