The Special Role that Time Plays in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
Jixin Ma
Reader/Professor of Computer Science
Greenwich University, London, United Kingdom
j.ma@gre.ac.uk
Abstract
The notion of time plays an essential and ubiquitous role in modelling natural phenomena and common-sense knowledge. One of the simplest, and the most important, human temporal enterprise is to handle time dependent information involving questions such as "When the car was collected from the garage?", "What happened after the shop had been closed?", and "Until when was the suspect away from home?", and so on. In fact, time seems to play the role of a common universal reference - everything appears to be related by its temporal reference, although the temporal reference may be absolute (e.g., "The shop opens at 9:00am"), or just relative (e.g., "He went back to his office after sitting in the garden for about 15 minutes”). The research of temporal representation and reasoning has led to a variety of temporal approaches/systems, attempting to capture the primary elements of time, for application to the modelling of human activities, such as problem solving, database management, natural language understanding, planning and the qualitative modelling of physical processes, etc. The purpose of this talk is to: (a) motivate and explain an important topic in Computer Systems; (b) provide an overview on some fundamental temporal issues; (c) show some interesting examples in temporal knowledge representation and reasoning.
Dr Jixin Ma is a Reader at the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, at the University of Greenwich, U.K. He is also a Guest/Visiting Professor of Beijing Normal University, Auhui University and Zhengzhou Light Industrial University, China.
Dr Ma obtained his BSc and MSc of Mathematics in 1982 and 1988, respectively, and PhD of Computer Sciences in 1994. His main research areas include Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering and Information Systems, with special interests in Temporal Logic, Temporal Databases, Reasoning about Action and Change, Case-Based Reasoning, Pattern Recognition and Graph Matching. He has published more than 70 research papers in international journals and conferences.
Dr Ma has been the Deputy Editor of the journal of Law, Computers, and Artificial Intelligence”, Editor of the Journal of Polibits, International Journal of Mathematics and Engineering with Computers, the Asian Journal of Information Management, Journal of Applied Sciences, and Programme Committee Member of various international conferences. He has also served as reviewers of many international journals and conferences.