Robert Kowalski


Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow

Department of Computing
Imperial College London


180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2BZ, UK.

Email: rak at doc.ic.ac.uk

Please note that I am no longer accepting research students.


Curriculum Vitae


A Short Story of My Life and Work


Computational Logic and Human Thinking:
How to be Artificially Intelligent

This book, published in July 2011 by Cambridge University Press, presents the principles of Computational Logic, so that they can be applied in everyday life.  I have written the main part of the book informally, both to reach a wider audience and to demonstrate that the enhanced logic is indeed useful for human thinking. However, I have also included a number of additional, more formal chapters for the more advanced reader.

I gave a short course based on the book at the Third International ALP/GULP Spring School on Computational Logic in Bertinoro, Italy, 10-15 April 2011. Here is a link to the slides.

I have also given a longer, 14 lecture course at the University of Kyoto, 3 October - 12 December 2012. (Each lecture is one and a half hours.) Here is a link to the slides for the complete set of lectures. If you are teaching a course, and would like solutions to the homework, please email me at rak at doc dot ic dot ac dot uk.

Jacinto Davila has also used a draft of this book for a course at Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela. Here is a link to his Spanish translation of an earlier draft.


Logic for Problem Solving

The book, originally published by North-Holland in 1979, is now out of print.


New paper: Towards a Logic-Based Framework for Computing with Fariba Sadri, June 2013

In this paper we propose a logic-based, framework for Computing, inspired by artificial intelligence, but scaled down for practical database and programming applications. Computation in the framework is viewed as the task of generating a sequence of state transitions, with the purpose of making an agent's goals all true. States are represented by sets of atomic sentences (or facts), representing the values of program variables, tuples in a coordination language, facts in relational databases, or Herbrand models.

In the model-theoretic semantics, the entire sequence of states and events is contained in a single model-theoretic structure, by associating time stamps with facts. But in the operational semantics, facts are updated destructively, without time stamps. We show that the model generated by destructive updates is identical to the model generated by reasoning with facts containing time stamps. We also extend the model with intentional predicates and composite event predicates defined by logic programs containing conditions in first-order logic, which are used to query the current state.


WUENIC:

I have been working with WHO and UNICEF since 2009, helping to develop, implement and deploy a set of logical rules to assist in estimating global, country by country, infant immunization coverage . The problem is to reconcile inconsistencies when different sources of data conflict - for example when government reported data is inconsistent with survey data. The purpose of the logical rules is to make the reconciliation and estimation process more transparent and more consistent.

The rules have been implemented in XSB Prolog as a purely declarative logic program, and have been used to assist in making the estimates in 2010, 2011 and 2012 for each of the preceding years. In addition to helping to ensure transparency and consistency, the Prolog implementation has also proved useful in providing detailed documentation of the rationale for each of the estimates.

There are two articles describing our work. The first , published in the online journal PLOS-ONE, describes our work for a general audience with little or no computing background. The second , presented at JURISIN 2011, describes the work for a more academic audience and compares it with previous work on the logical formalisation of the British Nationality Act.


Selected bibliography:

Early papers on theorem-proving, logic programming and knowledge representation:

Legal reasoning and argumentation

Metalogic programming

Event Calculus

Abductive Logic Programming 

From Abduction to Argumentation

Intelligent Agents

   Miscellaneous papers

Updated 27 August 2013