Knowledge representation with conceptual spaces

The aim of this seminar is to discuss learning conceptual space representations and how they can be utilised.

Location: Room C/2.07, Queen's Buildings, School of Computer Science and Informatics
Date: 7 February 2018 at 15:00

Abstract

Conceptual spaces have been proposed by Gärdenfors as an intermediate knowledge representation framework, sitting between high-level symbolic representations and low-level neural representations.

While the theory of conceptual spaces has been influential in philosophy and cognitive science, to date it has seen relatively few applications within the field of artificial intelligence. One of the main stumbling blocks for such applications is that learning conceptual space representations in a purely data-driven way is challenging.

In this talk, Professor Steven Schockaert will first give an overview of some approaches for learning conceptual space representations that have been developed within the context of the FLEXILOG project. Then he will briefly outline how these representations can be used in a natural way to implement forms of reasoning that require a combination of (knowledge base driven) deductive and (data-driven) inductive reasoning.

Biography

Professor Steven Schockaert is a professor in the School of Computer Science. His current research interests include commonsense reasoning, interpretable machine learning, vagueness and uncertainty modelling, representation learning, and geographic information retrieval.

Professor Schockaert holds an ERC Starting Grant, and has previously been supported by funding from the Leverhulme Trust, EPSRC, and FWO, among others.

He was the recipient of the 2008 ECCAI Doctoral Dissertation Award and the IBM Belgium Prize for Computer Science. He is on the board of directors of EurAI, on the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence and an area editor for Fuzzy Sets and Systems. He was PC co-chair of SUM 2016 and the general chair of UKCI 2017.

Next seminar

This seminar will be followed immediately by Dr. Frank C. Langbein discussing controlling quantum spin-1/2 networks for communication and computation.