World Logic Day Lecture: Adnan Darwiche
Beyond truth and falsehood: Logic as a Calculus of Events
| DATE: | Friday, January 12, 2024 |
| TIME: | 17:00 |
On 12 January 2024, we invited you to celebrate the international World Logic Day virtually with the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (VCLA) at TU Wien and the Logic community from the city of Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Actually, World Logic Day is celebrated on 14 January every year, but as this was a Sunday in 2024, we opted for an early start this year!
UNESCO proclaimed World Logic Day in 2019, in association with the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH), to enhance public understanding of logic and its implications for science, technology and innovation. “In the twenty-first century – indeed, now more than ever – the discipline of logic is a particularly timely one, utterly vital to our societies and economies. Computer science and information and communications technology, for example, are rooted in logical and algorithmic reasoning.” — Audrey Azoulay, Director General of UNESCO
The 2024 virtual Vienna World Logic Day Lecture was held by Adnan Darwiche (UCLA).
Abstract
Logic is widely viewed as a calculus of truth and falsehood. However, over the last few decades, the role of logic in AI has been mostly as a calculus of events, which has been effectively and profoundly employed in tasks such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning and explainable AI. In this talk, I will discuss some of the fundamental insights, techniques and tools that have emerged from this broader role of logic, and will provide concrete examples of how they enabled the development of state-of-the-art AI systems that transcend the traditional scope of logic.
About the speaker
Adnan Darwiche is a professor and former chairman of the computer science department at UCLA. He directs the automated reasoning group which focuses on the theory and practice of probabilistic and logical reasoning, and their applications to machine learning and explainable AI. His group is responsible for publicly releasing a number of high profile reasoning systems (http://reasoning.cs.ucla.edu/). Professor Darwiche is a Fellow of AAAI and ACM, a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), and author of “Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks,” by Cambridge University Press, 2009. Professor Darwiche founded the “Beyond NP” initiative in 2015 (http: //beyondnp.org/). Many of his works are featured at https://youtube.com/@UCLA.Reasoning.
You can watch the recording of the lecture on our Youtube channel:
