PhD Position in Modal Logic and ASP, IRIT (Toulouse)

PhD scholarship "Modal Logic, Foundations of Equilibrium Logic and Answer Set Programming"

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a successful new paradigm for declarative programming and logic-based problem solving. Recent research has focused on language extensions of ASP (e.g. by epistemic and temporal concepts) and on the development of logical techniques for program analysis and modularity.

Non-classical logics such as equilibrium logic [Lifschitz et al. 2001] are now widely acknowledged to form an adequate logical foundation for ASP. Recently it has been proposed to recast equilibrium logic in the framework of modal logic [Farinas and Herzig 2011].

The aim of the thesis is to further strengthen the connections between ASP and modal logic. Some of the areas that could be developed during the thesis are:

• modal logics contributing to the foundations of ASP;
• extensions of equilibrium logic with modal operators of time, knowledge, belief, etc.;
• hybrid knowledge bases that combine reasoning with nonmonotonic rules and classical knowledge sources such as ontologies.

The thesis will be prepared in the European Lab "Advanced Studies in Information Representation and Processing" in co-tutorship between Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM). It starts on October 1, 2011. The scholarship is provided by the French Ministery of Education (3 years, about 1600€ per month).

References:

[Farinas and Herzig 2011] L. Fariñas del Cerro and A. Herzig, "The modal logic of equilibrium models", Proc. Frontiers of Combining Systems (FroCoS 2011), to appear.
[Lifschitz et al. 2001] V. Lifschitz and D. Pearce and A. Valverde, "Strongly equivalent logic programs", ACM Transactions on Computational Logic 2 (4), pp. 526-541. 2001. (see http://www.equilibriumlogic.net)

Supervisors:

Andreas Herzig and Luis Farinas del Cerro (IRIT), David Pearce (UPM)

Required competences:

Applicants should have some knowledge of modal logic and/or ASP.

Applicants should send a CV (including grades) to herzig at irit.fr and farinas at irit.fr before July 10, 2011.