TITLE: Belief change based on global minimisation

PRESENTER: James Delgrande, http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~jim/, jim@cs.sfu.ca

AFFILIATION:School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, http://www.cs.sfu.ca/

DATE: Tuesday 6th February 2007

TIME: 12:00:00

PLACE: CSE Seminar Room, Level 1, K17

ABSTRACT:

A general framework for representing minimisation-based belief change
is described. A problem instance is made up of an undirected graph,
where a formula is associated with each vertex of the graph. Vertices
may represent spatial locations, points in time, or some other notion
of locality in some (concrete or abstract) space; edges may represent
spatial proximity, temporal adjacency, some other notion of adjacency,
respectively. Information is shared between vertices via a process of
minimisation over the graph. We give equivalent semantic and syntactic
characterisations of this minimisation, as well as a finite representation
result. While providing a general model of information sharing in
arbitrary settings modelable by a graph, we also show that this approach
is general enough to capture existing minimisation-based approaches to
belief merging, belief revision, and (temporal) extrapolation operators.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER:

Jim is a Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser
University in British Columbia, Canada. His research interests centre on
formal aspects of Knowledge Representation in Artificial Intelligence,
primariliy in the foundations of belief change, reasoning about action and
change, nonmonotonic reasoning, and reasoning with and about preferences.

Seminar information is also available at
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/db/ai/seminars/list/index.html

Host:

Toby Walsh

Seminar Convenor:

Van Hai Ho