BackgroundThe applications of logic in computer science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics run across a wide front. There are several active communities of researchers in diverse areas busy applying logic, and there is the urgent need to make them aware of each other and exchange ideas and common research themes. It was with this in mind that the interdisciplinary Augustus de Morgan Workshops in Logic were conceived five years ago. These Workshops address interdisciplinary areas concerning logics devised and used to model human reasoning, actions and behaviour. Such models arise in various practical and theoretical areas striving to provide devices that help/replace the human in his daily activity. Such models require, by their very nature, an interdisciplinary cooperation involving mathematical logic, automated deduction, knowledge representation and reasoning, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, natural language processing, philosophy, linguistics, law, etc. The plan was to hold a workshop every year, the Augustus de Morgan Workshop, devoted to an important interdisciplinary applied logic area and to invite some of the best and most active researchers in this area to focus on some clear problems. The workshop would last 2–3 days, be open to students and colleagues, conclude with a panel discussion and have proceedings published in one of the best international journals. The First Augustus de Morgan Workshop in 1999 addressed the frontiers of logical systems arising from applications. To accommodate the needs of applications new kinds of logics were constructed by diverse communities of researchers. The question arises, what is the new notion of logic in this context? We invited seven of the most active researchers in creating new logics to identify what is the new notion of logic: J. van Benthem, D. Makinson, J. Woods, R. Kempson, W. Meyer-Viol, W. Hodges and D. Gabbay. The Second Augustus de Morgan Workshop dealt with the history of logic, taking the view that there is a historical continuity in trying to logically model the human. This was in response to the realisation in the AI community, that much of the logic research in ancient and medieval logic was the result of attempts to analyse human (theological) reasoning and was therefore directly potentially relevant to current AI and argumentation problems. Thus the de Morgan Workshop of 2000 brought to the community relevant ideas from the history of logic. Some of the most known historians of logic gave lectures: A. Jones, I. Grattan-Guinness, G. Priest, W. Hodges, S. Read, G. Boger, C. Burnett and J. Ganeri. The Third Augustus de Morgan Workshop was on belief revision, a topic occurring in many disciplines, and chosen to be the first topic which is a meta-level logic notion. In other words, we discussed what it is to be a logic in 1999, we put it in a historical context in 2000 and now we discuss a very strong meta-level mechanism, that of revision, which is strongly multidisciplinary and involves many areas and many systems. Again the list of invited speakers `speaks' for itself, showing how central this topic is: D. Makinson, J. Woods, H. Rott, J. Paris, L. Hill, A. ter Meulen, E. Fermé, S. O. Hansson, K. Schlechta, and O. Rodrigues. The Fourth Augustus de Morgan Workshop was on logic and probability. Probability is a major component in common sense reasoning that so far has been developed side-by-side with the new logic. Can we dare to attempt integration? The de Morgan 2002 was not only an interdisciplinary conference but also a daring and visionary one. Bring logic and probability together in an organic way. This conference was a great success and for the first time we approached 100 participants. The list of speakers shows the breadth of the workshop: H. E. Kyburg, C. Howson, T. Kuipers, J. Y. Halpern, J. Paris, J. Kohlas, R. Bourne, P. Flach, S. Muggleton, and J. Fox. The Fifth Augustus de Morgan Workshop was on knowledge representation and the reasoning agent. Knowledge representation has played a crucial role in the development of artificial intelligence, and remains one of the strongest subfields of AI. From the earliest days of AI, leading researchers have argued that in order for a program to act intelligently, it must have sophisticated methods of representing and reasoning with knowledge. The contribution of KR research, e.g., the use of formal logic for representing knowledge, automated theorem proving techniques, logic programming, semantic networks, and inheritance techniques, have been at the forefront of the AI intellectual scene. The Sixth Augustus de Morgan Workshop was on Logic and Law. It explored the strong connections and common themes in logic and in law; legal reasoning in which temporal and psychological considerations play an indispensable role; and recent developments in the logics of agents and AI which brought logic to a stage where it can be of serious service to the law on the technical as well as the conceptual level. |
