Seminar

Technische Universität Dresden Institut für Theoretische Informatik Lehrstuhl für Automatentheorie

Hauptseminar theoretische Informatik: "Probability in Logics"

Topic of the Hauptseminar

Logical formalisms allow structured representation of application domains. In classical logic facts are crisp, e.g., they hold or not. In some applications it is necessary to handle probabilities of certain facts or uncertainty of events. In this seminar we study approaches that allow to express probability in logic formalisms and the reasoning methods devised for them.

Preliminary schedule

The seminar starts on Friday, October 18th, at 3:00pm in room 3027 of the computer science building with an introductory meeting. In this meeting all participating students will pick a research paper that they will write a report and give a talk about.

Presentations will take place during the last weeks of the teaching period (i.e. in February / January)—with one noteable exception, see the seminar schedule below for details.

Position in the Curriculum

Depending on your course of studies, you can use this seminar for the following modules:

• Informatik (diploma) / master: INF-AQUA
• Computational Logic: PCS (TCSL, PI); 3 credit points

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge in computational complexity is helpful.
For computer science students: “Formale Systeme” or “Grundlagen der Theoretischen Informatik”

Language

The language of the seminar is English — unless the seminar is attended by native German speakers only.

Preliminary schedule

The initial meeting is on Friday October 18th at 15:00 o'clock (a little later than the start of 5. DS) in room INF 3027.

When	Speaker	Topic	Partner paper of:	Tutor
18.10.2013 15:00	Anni-Y. Turhan	introductory session	-	-
25.10.2013 15:00	Ismail Ceylan	First order probabilistic Inference	Oliver F. Gil	Anni-Yasmin Turhan
04.02.2014, 11:10	Oliver F. Gil	Probabilistic Description Logics for Subjective Uncertainty	Ismail Ceylan	Anni-Yasmin Turhan

Goal of the Hauptseminar

Apart from learning about the main topic, students should learn how to get acquainted with a relevant body of literature, how to produce a well-structured paper, and how to give an understandable scientific talk.

Duties of Participants

For the CL master students this seminar can be used for several modules. Depending on the CL module the seminar will be used for, the student can either carry out the seminar in the calssical way (report and talk) or as an oral exam. This choice is only available to CL students , all other students can only have this seminar in the classical way.

• Oral exam — for the PI and TCSL modules
  Choose 3 papers from the pool of papers and make appointment for the exam and attend the seminar talks.
• Classical — for the AQUA and PCS modules
  In the initial meeting, students choose a topic to work on and are assigned a tutor. During the seminar, the student has to understand the relevant literature and writes a paper about the chosen topic (~12 pages). Finally, each student presents his/her work in a talk to the other participants. In doing this, he/she receives individual support by the tutor. The students should present
  • a first full version of their paper at least 5 weeks before their talk,
  • a first version of all the slides for their talk at least 2 weeks before the talk, and
  • a 20-25 minute presentation followed by 5-10 minutes of discussion.
  
  Additionally, students must meet the following requirements.
  • Refrain from any form of plagiarism in the preparation of your report. If you are unsure what is considered plagiarism in academia please consult this helpful guide by the University of Oxford.
  • Reserve enough time for the seminar.
  • Make appointments with your tutor. It is customary to have a first consultation within one or two weeks after the initial session. Remember that your tutor may not always be available because of travelling obligations. If possible, try to arrange meetings well ahead of time.
  • Make sure the produced paper conforms to the usual standards of scientific writing. Advice (in German) for writing scientific papers can be found here.
  • If possible use LaTeX for typesetting your report. If you absolutely have to use a different software you must make sure that all formulas are typeset using a formula editor.
  • If you choose to use LaTeX use either the document class article or scrartcl. Do not change fonts, font sizes, margins, headers or footers.
  • Prepare a question for the discussion of your partner paper. This will be explained in more detail during the introductory meeting.

Pool of papers

The seminar is about presenting and discussing papers from the following (not yet complete) list:

• An analysis of first order logics of probability
• Probabilistic Logic— taken!
• Probabilistic Logics programming and Bayesian Networks
• Bayesian Logics Programs
• Relationships Between Probabilistic Description and First-Order Logics— taken!
• Expressive Probabilistic Description Logics
• A Tractable First-Order Probabilistic Logic

Contact