Joint AIAI/IPAB Seminar 05 February 2024-Prof. Esra Erdem (Sabanci University Istanbul)

Speaker – Prof. Esra Erdem

Title  - Explanation Generation in Applications of Answer Set Programming

Abstract - As the definition of AI changes towards building rational agents that are provably beneficial for humans, answer set programming (ASP) plays an important role in addressing the user-oriented challenges in applications that come along during this shift, such as generality, flexibility, provability, hybridity, bi-directional interactions, and explainability. In this talk, I will focus on explainability and present different methods for explanation generation in three applications of ASP: complex biomedical queries for drug discovery, multi-modal multi-agent path finding with resource consumption, and robotic plan execution monitoring. 

Prof. Esra Erdem, Bio - Esra Erdem is a professor in computer science and engineering at Sabanci University, Istanbul. She received her Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, and carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto and Vienna University of Technology. Her research is in the area of artificial intelligence, in particular, the mathematical foundations of knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and their applications to various domains, including robotics, bioinformatics, logistics, and economics. Dr. Erdem was a general co-chair of ICLP 2013, a program co-chair of ICLP 2019 and KR 2020, and the general chair of KR 2021. She is an associate editor for Artificial Intelligence (AIJ) and Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), and the president of KR Inc.