What Is Answer Set Programming?

Speaker:	Prof. Vladimir Lifschitz
		Department of Computer Science
		University of Texas at Austin

Title:		"What Is Answer Set Programming?"

Date:		Monday, 7 February 2005

Time:		4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Venue:		Room 3464
		(CS/Maths Conference Room, via lift nos. 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a new form of declarative programming,
oriented towards difficult combinatorial search problems.  It has been
applied, for instance, to plan generation and product configuration
problems in Artificial Intelligence and to graph-theoretic problems
arising in VLSI design and in historical linguistics.  ASP helps the
organizers of computer science conferences assign submissions to referees
in accordance with their preferences.  Syntactically, ASP programs look
like Prolog programs, but the computational mechanisms used in ASP are
different: they are based on the ideas that have led to the development of
fast satisfiability solvers for propositional logic.


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Biography:

Vladimir Lifschitz is Gottesman Family Centennial Professor in Computer
Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is interested in
computational logic and in applications of logic to Artificial
Intelligence.  Lifschitz received a degree in mathematics from the Steklov
Mathematical Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia) in 1971 and emigrated to
the United States in 1976.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for
Artificial Intelligence, an editorial advisor of the journal Theory and
Practice of Logic Programming, an area editor of the ACM Transactions on
Computational Logic, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of
Automated Reasoning.