UB - University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

An introduction to the issues and techniques of representing knowledge and belief in a computer system; syntax and semantics of various representational formalisms including predicate logic, semantic networks, and frames. Classic papers will be read and current research issues discussed.

This course is an introduction to the issues and techniques of representing knowledge and belief in a computer system. Of course, a representation is useless unless it can be used for some purpose. The main purpose of items of knowledge and belief is reasoning about and with them. Thus, the field is often called "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning", or "KRR". It is our belief that formal logic provides the basic foundation to KRR. So this course may be considered a course in computational logic. However, there are many systems of logic. The most well-known logics were designed to form the foundations of mathematics, rather than the foundations of human-like representation and reasoning. So this course examines several systems of logic, how they are defined, how reasoning procedures can be implemented for them, and how they can be used for human-like reasoning problems. This course provides a basic grounding in KRR for people interested in: Artificial Intelligence; Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Database Systems; Logic Programming; Philosophy of Mind and of Language; and applications areas that employ formal representations of ontologies.

http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~shapiro/Courses/CSE563/2010/

Knowledge of a high-level programming language (such as Lisp) and CSE 305:Cross listed with CSE463.