Logic & FOM Presentation this Friday

[Ryan Flannery]

Dear all UC Logic & FOM subscribers,

There will be a presentation this week by Professor John Schlipf
(Computer Science) on a recently published paper titled
"Probabilistic Modal Logic" by Afsaneh Shirazi and Eyal Amir.

The presentation will be on Friday, from 3:30pm to 5pm in 807 Old Chem.

Abstract of the Paper:
A modal logic is any logic for handling modalities: concepts
like possibility, necessity, and knowledge. Artificial intelligence
uses modal logics most heavily to represent and reason
about knowledge of agents about others' knowledge. This
type of reasoning occurs in dialog, collaboration, and competition.
In many applications it is also important to be able to
reason about the probability of beliefs and events.
In this paper we provide a formal system that represents probabilistic
knowledge about probabilistic knowledge. We also
present exact and approximate algorithms for reasoning about
the truth value of queries that are encoded as probabilistic
modal logic formulas. We provide an exact algorithm which
takes a probabilistic Kripke structure and answers probabilistic
modal queries in polynomial-time in the size of the model.
Then, we introduce an approximate method for applications
in which we have very many or infinitely many states. Exact
methods are impractical in these applications and we show
that our method returns a close estimate efficiently.

-Ryan

[Zheng, Xizhong (zhengxn)]

Dear Ryan,

Ning and I will not be in campus this Friday. Since we are interested in
the talk, is it possible to postpone the talk to Friday of next week?

Thanks
Xizhong

[Pavel Klinov]

Ryan and others,

If you decide to put off the talk, could you send me the notes (if any) afterwards? I've got the paper of course, but Dr. Schlipf's summary, your overall impression, etc., are certainly interesting.

cheers,
--pavel

PS. This Friday is my last day at UC. I'm moving to the University of Manchester.