LPS as Step towards a Unifying Framework for Computing

As a scientific discipline, the field of Computing lacks a unifying framework. It consists, instead, of diverse languages and techniques in the mostly disjoint areas of programming, databases, and artificial intelligence. LPS (logic-based production system) is an attempt to implement a unifying framework that is lacking in Computing today.

LPS includes both logic programs and reactive rules of the form if antecedent then consequent, which are a logical reconstruction and generalisation of production system rules. Logic programs in LPS can be regarded as representing the beliefs of an intelligent agent, and reactive rules as representing the agent’s goals. Computation in LPS consists in destructively performing state-transforming actions to make consequents true whenever antecedents become true. Arguably, this combination of logic and change of state makes LPS not only a programming, database, and AI knowledge representation and problem-solving language, but also a scaled-down model of human thinking.

In my talk, I will demonstrate an open-source, web-based prototype of LPS, which was developed with Fariba Sadri and Miguel Calejo, to support the teaching of computing and logic in schools. The prototype is accessible from http://lps.doc.ic.ac.uk/.

About the speaker:

Robert Kowalski is Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London. He studied at the University of Chicago, the University of Bridgeport, Stanford University, the University of Warsaw, and the University of Edinburgh, where he completed his PhD in 1970. He joined Imperial College in 1975.

Kowalski’s early research was in the field of automated theorem-proving, leading to the development of logic programming in the early 1970s. His later research has focused on the use of logic programming for knowledge representation and problem solving, including work on the event calculus, legal reasoning, abductive reasoning and argumentation. He is currently working with Fariba Sadri on developing the logic and computer language LPS. The philosophical background for this work is presented in his 2011 book Computational Logic and Human Thinking – How to be Artificially Intelligent. An open-source, online prototype is accessible from http://lps.doc.ic.ac.uk/.

During the 1980s, Kowalski was heavily involved in the British response to the Japanese Fifth Generation Project. He also served as an advisor to the UNDP Knowledge Based Systems Project in India, and to DFKI, the German Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Recently he has been an advisor to the Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, of the World Health Organization in Geneva.

Kowalski is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the European Association for Artificial Intelligence, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He received the IJCAI (International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence) award for Research Excellence in 2011, and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Award for Eminent Scientists for 2012-2014.