Talk: Explanation Generation for Human-Centered Applications using Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

📅 Wednesday, November 4 | 2:30 p.m. | In-person format at Auditorio Picarte (FCFM, U. de Chile)

On Wednesday, November 4, the Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación de la Universidad de Chile (DCC U. de Chile) will welcome Esra Erdem, computer science and engineering professor at Sabancı University, in Istanbul. The researcher’s presentation will focus on knowledge representation and reasoning (KR&R), an area of artificial intelligence that studies how to store information about the real world in a structured, machine-readable format, so that machines can understand, organize, and apply real-world information for decision-making.

Erdem will address how these techniques make it possible to generate explanations that are understandable and useful for people in artificial intelligence applications, through examples related to biomedical queries for drug discovery and route planning for multiple agents.

Abstract: Human-centered applications involve a wide range of user-oriented computational challenges, such as flexibility, diversity, provability, hybridity, interactivity, and explainability. Knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) plays an important role in addressing such challenges at various stages of developing methods for applications, ranging from modeling to solving, verification to explanations, and benchmarking to evaluations. In this talk, I will focus on explainability and illustrate the usefulness of KR for explanation generation in two applications in the wild: answering complex biomedical queries for drug discovery, multi-modal multi-agent path finding with resource consumption.

Esra Erdem is a professor of computer science and engineering at Sabancı University, in Istanbul. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto and the Vienna University of Technology. Her research focuses on the field of artificial intelligence, specifically on the mathematical foundations of knowledge representation and automated reasoning, as well as their applications in various areas such as robotics, bioinformatics, logistics, and economics.

Erdem has also served as general co-chair and program co-chair of the International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP), and as program co-chair and general chair of the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), among others. She is also an associate editor of The Journal of Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), and Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

Details:
📅 Date and time: Wednesday, November 4, at 2:30 p.m.
📍 In-person format: Auditorio Picarte of the Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación U. de Chile (Beauchef 851, 3rd Floor, West Wing).

More information here.