ISCL Spring School on Computational Logic - early registration: March 10, 2011

[Paolo Torroni]

ISCL 2011
Third International ALP/GULP School on Computational Logic
Bertinoro, Italy, April 10-15, 2011 (co-located with DALT School 2011)
http://lia.deis.unibo.it/confs/iscl

* EARLY REGISTRATION DEADLINE: MARCH 10, 2011 *

Computational Logic has many applications, including the modeling of 
intelligent systems, verification of software, and the support of 
systems for solving computationally hard problems. Moreover, being 
founded on mathematical logic, tools based on CL are themselves amenable 
to safe optimization and verification techniques. ISCL 2011 builds on 
the success of 6 schools organized by GULP, the Italian Association for 
Logic Programming. GULP, founded in 1985, is a non-profit organization 
which is in charge of organizing the Italian Conference on Computational 
Logic. ISCL 2011 is the result of a partnership between GULP and ALP, 
the Association for Logic Programing. It aims at giving a comprehensive 
introduction to this exciting research domain and disseminate the 
results of research with a perspective on the future. The school will 
provide a rich programme of lectures on different aspects of CL, 
covering both the theoretical framework and relevant practical 
perspectives, techniques and tools. Each lecture will provide the basic 
notions of its topic before proceeding to more advanced issues. The 
school will include activities dedicated to graduate students and final 
exams on request.

LECTURERS

Giorgio Delzanno is Associate Professor the University ofGenoa. He has 
given many important contributions in automated verification, model 
checking, infinite-state systems, models for concurrent and biological 
systems. He has been the recipient of several research grants and 
international awards.

Enrico Franconi is the Director of the European Masters Program in 
Computational Logic at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and 
Principal Investigator in many EU-funded actions, networks of excellence 
and large-scale projects on topics related to the semantic web, 
networked knowledge, business processes and integration of ontological 
and rule-based reasoning.

Robert Kowalski is Professor Emeritus at Imperial CollegeLondon, and one 
of the first developers of logic programming. He made important 
contributions to various areas such as automated reasoning, representing 
and reasoning about time, abductive logic programming and intelligent 
agents. His current research focuses on the application of computational 
logic to cognitive science.

Dale Miller is the Director of Research at INRIA Saclay and leader of 
the Parsifal team working on foundational aspects of proof theory as 
well as on the design and implementation of systems that exploit that 
foundational work. His main interests are in programming language 
theory, proof theory, linear logic, and automated deduction.

Pascal Van Hentenryck is Professor of computer science at Brown 
University, and the Director of the optimization laboratory. He was the 
main designer and implementor of the CHIP programming system. He leads 
many research projects funded by public and private institutions, in 
which his research is applied to a large number of domains.

ACTIVITIES

The programme will include:
- an introductory lecture to give an overview of the school
- 5 topical courses of 6 hours each
- student sessions with focussed brainstorming and organized mentoring 
activities
- a social trip

TARGET AUDIENCE

The school targets graduate students as well as other interested 
researchers, from university, government and industry. It will allow 
students to get a thorough overview of cutting-edge research and 
technologies and get in touch with leading scientists.
The school aims to be truly international with a strong participation 
from regions all around the world. This will help students make 
connections with international participants and set the base for 
potentially long-term cooperations.
An initial list of participants is available on the school Web site.

FINANCIAL AID AND MORE

Grant application is now closed. However, additional support is still 
available to AEPIA, APPIA, ACIA, AIxIA and AISB members. Limited 
personal subscription to selected journals will be offered by John Wiley 
& Sons to all attendees registered before March 25, 2011.

VENUE

The University Residential Center is located in the small medieval 
hilltop town of Bertinoro, 50km east of Bologna at an elevation of 230m 
above sea level. Bertinoro is easily reachable from Bologna and Forli 
airport or train station. The registration includes shuttle bus on April 
10 and April 15. Bertinoro is close to many splendid Italian locations 
such as Ravenna, Rimini on the Adriatic coast, and the Republic of San 
Marino (all within 35km). Bertinoro can also be a base for visiting some 
of the better-known Italian locations such as Padua, Ferrara,Venice, 
Urbino, Florence and Siena.

LECTURES

Unity in Computational Logic

Computational logic is divided into several different fragments. There 
is the division between the proof-as-program (functional programming) 
approach and the proof-search (logic programming) approach to specifying 
computation. There is the division among computation, model checking, 
and theorem proving. Even at the level of the description of such 
technical devices as proofs systems, there is the division among sequent 
calculus, natural deduction, tableaux, and resolution. In these 
lectures, I will show how recent results in structural proof theory 
bring an organization to these topics so that these divisions can be 
understood as certain choices within a large, flexible framework. That 
framework involves recent lessons learned from linear logic, focused 
proofs systems, and the use of fixed points and equality as logical 
connectives. (Lecturer: Dale Miller).

Constraint Languages for Parametrized Verification: Bags, Words, Trees, 
and Graphs

Parametrized verification is aimed at developing methods for proving the 
correctness of systems consisting of an arbitrary number of repeated 
components. In the lectures we overview some of the methods that can be 
applied to systems in which configurations can be represented by 
structures like bags, words, trees, and graphs. Examples of this class 
of systems are: broadcast protocols (used to model cache coherence 
protocols), automata with  global conditions (used to model mutual 
exclusion protocols for N-processes), tree rewriting systems (used to 
model hierarchical systems), selective broadcast protocols (used to 
model protocols for ad hoc networks). In the presentation we use the 
metaphor "constraints as symbolic representation of sets of states" to 
give a uniform presentation of verification methods and of termination 
conditions in all these types of systems. Prerequisites: Basics of logic 
and algorithms. (Lecturer: Giorgio Delzanno).

Description Logics

The main effort of the research in knowledge representation is providing 
theories and systems for expressing structured knowledge and for 
accessing and reasoning with it in a principled way. In this course we 
will study Description Logics (DL), an important powerful class of 
logic-based knowledge representation languages, which also form the 
logical underpinning of the OWL family of web ontology languages 
standardised by W3C. The emphasis will be on a rigorous approach to 
knowledge representation and building ontologies. DL will be introduced 
with its simplest formalization; the computational properties and 
algorithms of the so called structural DL will be analysed. Then, the 
course considers propositional DL: we will study the computational 
properties and the reasoning with tableaux calculus. In the final part 
of the course, we will consider advanced topics such as the 
representation of knowledge bases and ontologies, and the connections of 
DL with database theory. (Lecturer: Enrico Franconi).

Constraint Programming and Optimization Systems

Constraint programming is a declarative paradigm for expressing and 
solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. Constraint programming 
features an expressive and compositional language for expressing 
constraints, which captures substructures on an application. Moreover, 
constraint programming typically offers a rich search language to guide 
the solver towards feasible and infeasible solutions. Computationally, 
constraint programming uses constraints to filter infeasible values from 
the variable domains. This course reviews both of these aspects, 
explores the hybridization of constraint programming with other 
optimization paradigms, and discusses similarities and differences with 
other approaches to optimization and constraint satisfaction. Real case 
studies in a modern constraint programming languages demonstrate the 
technology. (Lecturer: Pascal Van Hentenryck).

Computational Logic and Human Thinking: How to be Artificially Intelligent

This course is based on the book Computational Logic and Human Thinking: 
How to be Artificially Intelligent to be published by Cambridge 
University Press. In both this course and the book, I make the case for 
a comprehensive, logic-based theory of human intelligence, drawing upon 
and reconciling a number of otherwise competing paradigms in Artificial 
Intelligence and other fields. The most important of these paradigms are 
production systems, logic programming, classical logic and decision 
theory. The technical foundations of the theory are provided by 
abductive logic programming embedded in an observation-thought 
decision-action agent cycle. The theory draws support, not only from 
Logic, Computing and Artificial Intelligence, but from related 
developments in Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy, Law and Management 
Science. (Lecturer: Robert Kowalski).

FEES

Standard registration is 700 euro until March 10, 2011.

Standard registrations are ALL-INCLUSIVE and cover access to all 
lectures and exams, mentoring program and student session, lodging (5 
nights) in double room (subject to availability), welcome cocktail, 
breakfasts, coffee breaks, lunches and canteen/restaurant dinners, 
social trip (including dinner), Internet access. Daily registrations are 
also possible, as well as separate fees for accompanying person, 
upgrades to single room, and B&B accommodation for early arrivals and 
late departures at convenient rates.

SPONSORS

AI Journal, Association for Logic Programming, Italian Association for 
Logic Programming, Spanish Association for AI, Catalan Association for 
AI, Portuguese Association for AI, The British Society for the Study of 
AI andSimulation of Behaviour, Italian Association for AI, Italian 
Association for Logic Programming, SICStus Prolog, John Wiley& Sons, 
Bertinoro International Center for Informatics.

ORGANISATION

School Organisers
   Paolo Torroni, DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy
   Maurizio Gabbrielli, DSI, University of Bologna, Italy

Student Session Organiser
   Marco Montali, DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy

Local Organisers
   Marco Prandini, DEIS, University of Bologna
   Eleonora Campori, Bertinoro Center for Informatics
   Manuela Schiavi, Bertinoro Center for Informatics

INQUIRIES

For all visa-related and administrative concerns such as payment, 
registration, lodging, and local logistics, contact Eleonora Campori, 
ecampori at ceub.it.

Direct all other inquires to iscl.2011 at gmail.com. We will answer in 2 
working days.