Lecture by Prof. Torsten Schaub

16:30-18:00, Friday, October 5th, 2012

Room #1208, National Institute of Informatics (Access)

Answer Set Programming in Practice

Prof. Torsten Schaub (University of Potsdam, Germany)

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative problem solving approach, combining a rich yet simple modeling language with high-performance solving capacities. ASP is particularly suited for modeling problems in the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning involving incomplete, inconsistent, and changing information. Applications of ASP include automatic synthesis of multiprocessor systems, decision support systems for NASA shuttle controllers, Linux package configuration, reasoning tools in systems biology, and many more. The versatility of ASP is also reflected by the ASP solver clasp, developed at the University of Potsdam, winning first places at ASP, CASC, MISC, PB, and SAT competitions.

This short tutorial presents a practical introduction to ASP, aiming at using ASP languages and systems for solving application problems. We also give an overview of the open source project Potassco, the Potsdam Answer Set Solving Collection, bundling tools for Answer Set Programming developed at the University of Potsdam.

Torsten Schaub received his diploma and dissertation in informatics in 1990 and 1992, respectively, from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He received his habilitation in informatics in 1995 from the University of Rennes I, France. From 1990 to 1993 he was a Researcher at the Technical University at Darmstadt. From 1993 to 1995, he was a Research Associate at IRISA/INRIA at Rennes. From 1995 to 1997, he was University Professor at the University of Angers. At Angers he founded the research group FLUX dealing with the automatisation of reasoning from incomplete, contradictory, and evolutive information. Since 1997, he is University Professor for knowledge processing and information systems at the University of Potsdam. In 1999, he became Adjunct Professor at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, Canada; and since 2006 he is also an Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems at Griffiths University, Australia. Since 2012, Torsten Schaub is a fellow of ECCAI. His research interests range from the theoretic foundations to the practical implementation of methods for reasoning from incomplete, inconsistent, and evolving information, in particular Answer set programming.