New perspectives on reasoning about logical conflicts in A.I.

This talk presents new perspectives on reasoning about logical conflicts, which has been a key open issue in A.I. for decades. Novel conceptual models of reasoning, combined with recent dramatic performance improvements of satisfiability checking techniques, open new perspectives for the implementation of common-sense reasonings that involve such conflicts.

Éric Grégoire received his Master of Science of Engineering (“Ingénieur Civil”) with maxima cum laude in 1984 and his PhD in 1989 from the University of Louvain in Belgium, where he was awarded the IBM Belgium Prize in 1990. He has held positions at INRIA, CNRS and the University of Rennes 1 and spent one year at UMIACS at the University of Maryland. Since 1993 he has been a full professor at the University of Artois in France, where he is the director of CRIL, a joint CNRS-Artois research lab dedicated to Artificial Intelligence that he founded in 1994 and involves now more than 60 members, including 30 tenured and CNRS permanent scientists. É. Grégoire is the author of more than 120 peer-reviewed publications in international conferences and journals in A.I., focusing on logic-based A.I., satisfiability and search. In parallel, É. Grégoire has held various scientific responsibilities at the French Ministry of Research and Higher Education for the last 12 years. He is currently in charge, among other things, of the accreditation of the French Universities in information technologies and mathematics programs.

Reaching Semantic Agreements in Multi-Agent Systems

This talk is about reconciling semantic differences that cooperative agents may have: Differences concerning the semantics of symbols agents use for representing and reasoning about the world. The talk will motivate the importance of reaching semantic agreements and provide examples of using semantic descriptions of actions, norms, institutions, etc using ontology languages. Then it will present the problem of reconciling semantic differences as a problem of aligning ontologies, and it will proceed to the most general problem of reaching semantic agreements in settings where multiple agents are connected in arbitrary ways and have to coordinate the meaning of symbols e.g. for effective teamwork.

Prof. George Vouros (B.Sc, Ph.D) holds a BSc in Mathematics, and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence all from the University of Athens, Greece. Currently he is a Professor in the Department of Digital Systems in the University of Piraeus. He has done research in the areas of Knowledge Representation, Ontologies (alignment, learning, population, modularization, distributed reasoning), and Multi-Agent Systems (collaborative agent architectures, semantic coordination, adaptive architectures and organizations, information dissemination in large scale settings). He has published extensively on the above mentioned themes. Further details concerning his work can be found in http://ai-group.ds.unipi.gr/georgev/ He has also extensively served as chair, program chair and member of organizing committees of national and international conferences on related topics. Prof. Vouros has served as head of the ICSD Department of the University of the Aegean for 5 consecutive years and as Dean of the School of Sciences for the same University for 4 years. He has been elected two times to serve the chair of the board of the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society.

Energy Management and Data Centres: Where Optimisation and Learning Meet

There is growing interest in integrating optimisation and machine learning technologies to solve complex problems that arise in real-world applications. In this talk I will consider the challenge of optimising internet data centres from an energy perspective. In particular, I will focus on the specific problems of day-ahead energy price prediction and energy-aware workload consolidation.

Professor Barry O'Sullivan is a Full Professor (Chair of Constraint Programming) in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork. He is Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at University College Cork and leads its research programme on optimisation and decision analytics. Professor O'Sullivan served as Program Chair of the 2014 International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, and co-Program Chair of the Prestigious Application of Intelligent Systems Track at the 2014 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He serves on the editorial boards of Constraints: An International Journal, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), and Artificial Intelligence Review.