24 January 2019, AI? That's logical!, Frank van Harmelen

The history of AI has been a continuous swing of the pendulum between the extremes of logical reasoning and statistical learning; or, as Judea Pearl has it: between Greek philosophers and Babylonian curve fitters. In recent years, the pendulum has swung strongly towards the statistical methods. We'll take a close look at the history of AI, and we'll identify the strong and weak points of both schools of thought. This will lead to a set of challenges to be taken up by logicians if they are interested in contributing to one of the most exciting intellectual endeavours of our time.

Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the scientific director of the Network Institute, an institute that aims at advancing interdisciplinary research on the digital society. As an internationally leading researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, he played a key role in the development of the Semantic Web. Frank van Harmelen is a member of the Academia Europea and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The talk is the public part of the conference SYSMICS2019, an international scientific meeting in the area of logic. This conference is the closing event of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Rise project Syntax meets Semantics -- Methods, Interactions, and Connections in Substructural logics, which involves more than twenty universities from all over the world. SYSMICS2019 is organised by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA).

Attendance is free, but registration is necessary by following this link: http://events.illc.uva.nl/SYSMICS2019/Registration/Public-lecture/