Talks

PhD Defense: Time-Situated Metacognitive Agency and Other Aspects of Commonsense Reasoning

Matthew Goldberg

3137 Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering (IRB)

Thursday, May 19, 2022, 2:00-4:00 pm

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Abstract

Much research in commonsense reasoning (CSR) involves use of external representations of an agent's reasoning, based on compelling features of classical logic. However, these advantages come with severe costs, including: omniscience, consistency, static semantics, frozen deadlines, lack of self-knowledge, and lack of expressive power to represent the reasoning of others. Active logic was developed to address many of these, but work to date still leaves serious gaps. The present work focuses on major extensions of active logic to deal with self-knowledge, and their implementation into a newly-developed automated reasoner for commonsense active logic. Dealing with self-knowledge has been designed and implemented in the reasoner via a new treatment of quotation as a form of nesting. More sophisticated varieties of nesting, particularly quasi-quotation mechanisms, have also been developed to extend the basic form of quotation. Active logic and the reasoner are applied to classical issues in CSR, including a treatment of one agent having the knowledge and inferential mechanisms to reason about another's time-situated reasoning.

Examining Committee:

Chair:
Dean's Representative:
Members:

Dr. Donald Perlis
Dr. Ted Jacobson
Dr.  Michelle Mazurek
Dr. James Reggia
Dr.  Darsana Josyula (Bowie State)

Bio

Matthew Goldberg is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science advised by Donald Perlis. His research focuses on active logic, commonsense reasoning, and syntactic theories of belief.

This talk is organized by Tom Hurst