Title: A Tractable, Expressive, and Eventually Complete First-Order Logic of Limited Belief
Presented By: Gerhard Lakemeyer, Aachen University

Abstract:
In knowledge representation, obtaining a notion of belief which is tractable, expressive, and eventually complete has been a somewhat elusive goal. Expressivity here means that an agent should be able to hold arbitrary beliefs in a very expressive language like that of first-order logic, but without being required to perform full logical reasoning on those beliefs. Eventual completeness means that any logical consequence of what is believed will eventually come to be believed, given enough reasoning effort. Tractability in a first-order setting has been a research topic for many years, but in most cases limitations were needed on the form of what was believed, and eventual completeness was so far restricted to the propositional case. In this paper, we propose a novel logic of limited belief, which has all three desired properties.

Biography:
Gerhard Lakemeyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1990. After six years at the University of Bonn he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University, where he is Full Professor and heads the Knowledge-Based Systems Group. He is also a Full Professor (status-only) at the University of Toronto, Canada, and a Professorial Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His research interests include knowledge representation and cognitive robotics. He has published more than 150 scientific papers and has served on numerous program committees, including IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, and KR. He is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), past President of EurAI, Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence, and Area Editor of Computational Intelligence. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Applied Logic, and was a member of the Editorial and Advisory Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.