Abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) are one of the central formalisms in AI; equipped with a wide range of semantics, they have proven useful in several application domains. In the thesis we want to complete and extend the recent study on expressiveness of argumentation semantics and use these and other theoretical results for implementations of reasoning tasks in AFs. Moreover, we plan to utilize results on realizability in dynamic scenarios of abstract argumentation, such as revision of argumentation frameworks. Hereby, the knowledge of which extensions can occur together is of central interest when trying to achieve a certain outcome. In other words, the ultimate goal of the thesis is to gain theoretical insights on argumentation semantics in order to employ them in practically efficient reasoning systems for both the evaluation and evolution of AFs.

Increasing complexity of technical systems requires a precise fault localization in order to reduce maintenance costs and system downtimes. Model-based diagnosis has been presented as a method to derive root causes for observed symptoms, utilizing a description of the system to be diagnosed. Practical applications of model-based diagnosis, however, are often prevented by the initial modeling task and computational complexity associated with diagnosis. In the proposed thesis, we investigate techniques addressing these issues. In particular, we utilize a mapping function which converts fault information available in practice into propositional horn logic sentences to be used in abductive model-based diagnosis. Further, we plan on devising algorithms which allow an efficient computation of explanations given the obtained models.

After a disaster, instability in the environment may delay search and rescue efforts until it is safe enough for human rescuers to enter the environment. Such delays can be significant, but it is still possible to gather information about the environment in the interim, by sending in a team of robots to scout the area and locate points of interest. We present several algorithms to accomplish this exploration, and provide both theoretical proofs and simulation results that show the algorithms will achieve full exploration of an unknown environment even under communication restrictions.

In this dissertation, we propose an online learning technique to predict a value of a continuous variable by (i) integrating a set of data streams from heterogeneous sources with time varying compositions including (a) changing the quality of data streams, (b) addition or deletion of data streams (ii) integrating the results of several analysis algorithms for each data source when the most suitable algorithm for a given data source is not known a priori (iii) dynamically weighting the prediction of each analysis algorithm and data source on the system prediction based on their varying quality.

Our research is within the area of artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. More specifically, we focus on evaluating trust relationships between the agents in multi-agent e-marketplaces and sensor networks and aim to address the following problems: 1) how to identify a trustworthy (good quality) agent; 2) how to cope with dishonest advisors i.e., agents who provide misleading opinions about others.

Static analysis is a core task in query optimization and knowledge base verification. We study static analysis techniques for SPARQL, the standard language for querying Semantic Web data. Specifically, we investigate the query containment problem and query-update independence analysis. We are interested in developing techniques through reductions to the validity problem in logic.

Nowadays web users actively generate content on different social media platforms. The large number of users requiring personalized services creates a unique opportunity for researchers to explore user modelling. Substantial research has been done by utilizing user generated content to model users by applying different classification or regression techniques. These techniques are powerful types of machine learning approaches, however they only partially model social media users. In this work, we introduce a new statistical relational learning (SRL) framework suitable for this purpose, which we call PSL Q . PSL Q is the first SRL framework that supports reasoning with soft quantifiers, such as “most” and “a few”. Indeed, in models for social media it is common to assume that friends are influenced by each other’s behavior, beliefs, and preferences. Thus, having a trait only becomes probable once most or some of one’s friends have that trait. Expressing this dependency requires a soft quantifier, which can be modeled with PSL^Q. Our experimental results for link prediction in social trust networks demonstrate that the use of soft quantifiers not only allows for a natural and intuitive formulation of domain knowledge, but also improves the accuracy of inferred results.

The latest research on prediction of the outcome of elections using Twitter data, the election tweets labeling area has hardly been explored. Therefore, the authors of this paper propose to develop a semi-automated model for labeling political tweets. The expected result of this study is to contribute to enhance the quality of the choice of messages used in the labeling process by reducing the time selection of messages and the efficiency of classifying the messages and, thus, to increase the accuracy of the models using this approach. The proposed method could label 2200 messages from the analysis of only 60 messages by 20 users. The first results obtained by the method were higher than the process carried out manually by humans.

This article presents a bipartite graph propagation method to be applied to different tasks in the machine learning unsupervised domain, such as topic extraction and clustering. We introduce the objectives and hypothesis that motivate the use of graph based method, and we give the intuition of the proposed Bipartite Graph Propagation Algorithm. The contribution of this study is the development of new method that allows the use of heuristic knowledge to discover topics in textual data easier than it is possible in the traditional mathematical formalism based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Initial experiments demonstrate that our Bipartite Graph Propagation algorithm return good results in a static context (offline algorithm). Now, our research is focusing on big amount of data and dynamic context (online algorithm).

Most logic-based machine learning algorithms rely on an Occamist bias where textual simplicity of hypotheses is optimised. This approach, however, fails to distinguish between the efficiencies of hypothesised programs, such as quick sort (O(n log n)) and bubble sort (O(n^2)). We address this issue by considering techniques to minimise both the resource complexity and textual complexity of hypothesised programs. We describe an algorithm proven to learn optimal resource complexity robot strategies, and we propose future work to generalise this approach to a broader class of logic programs.