Queryable Self-Deliberating Dynamic Systems

Speaker:        Prof. Giuseppe De Giacomo
                Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica Automatica e Gestionale
                Sapienza Università di Roma

Title:          "Queryable Self-Deliberating Dynamic Systems"
                (An IJCAI'19 Invited Talk)

Date:           Thursday, 8 August 2019

Time:           11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:          Room 2463 (via lift no. 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Dynamic systems that operate autonomously in nondeterministic (uncertain)
environments are becoming a reality. These include intelligent robots,
self-driving cars, but also manufacturing systems (Industry 4.0), smart
objects and spaces (IoT), advanced business process management systems
(BPM), and many others. These systems are currently being revolutionized
by advancements in sensing (vision, language understanding) and actuation
components (autonomous mobile manipulators, automated storage and
retrieval systems). However, in spite of these advances, their core logic
is still mainly based on hard-wired rules either designed or possibly
obtained through a learning process.

On the other hand, we can envision systems that are able to deliberate by
themselves about their course of action when un-anticipated circumstances
arise, new goals are submitted, new safety conditions are required, and
new regulations and conventions are imposed. Crucially, empowering dynamic
systems with deliberating capabilities carries significant risks and
therefore we must be able to balance such power with trust. For this
reason it is of interest to make these systems queryable, analyzable and
explainable in human terms, so as to be guarded by human oversight. In
this talk we discuss how recent scientific discoveries in Knowledge
Representation and Planning combined with insights from Verification and
Synthesis in Formal Methods, Data-Aware Processes in Databases, as well as
other areas of AI, chart a novel path for realizing what we may call
Queryable Self-Deliberating Dynamic Systems. That is, systems with a
multifaceted model of the world that can be exploited to deliberate on
their course of action and answer queries about their behavior.


******************
Biography:

Giuseppe De Giacomo is full professor in Computer Science and Engineering
at Univ. Roma "La Sapienza". His research activity has concerned
theoretical, methodological and practical aspects in different areas of AI
and CS, most prominently Knowledge Representation, Reasoning about
Actions, Generalized Planning, Autonomous Agents, Service Composition,
Business Process Modeling, Data Management and Integration. He is AAAI
Fellow, ACM Fellow, and EurAI Fellow. He is Program Chair of ECAI 2020,
and will give an invited talk at IJCAI'2019 on the same topic. He has got
an ERC Advanced Grant for the project WhiteMech: White-box Self
Programming Mechanisms (2019-2024).