Abductive Reasoning

Allen, associate professor of statistics, computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Rice and of pediatrics-neurology at Baylor College of Medicine, will address the topic in both a press briefing and a general session today at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "The question is, 'Can we really trust the discoveries that are currently being made using machine-learning techniques applied to large data sets?'" "The answer in many situations is probably, 'Not without checking,' but work is underway on next-generation machine-learning systems that will assess the uncertainty and reproducibility of their predictions." Machine learning (ML) is a branch of statistics and computer science concerned with building computational systems that learn from data rather than following explicit instructions. Allen said much attention in the ML field has focused on developing predictive models that allow ML to make predictions about future data based on its understanding of data it has studied. "A lot of these techniques are designed to always make a prediction," she said.

Rice University statistician Genevera Allen says scientists must keep questioning the accuracy and reproducibility of scientific discoveries made by machine-learning techniques until researchers develop new computational systems that can critique themselves. Allen, associate professor of statistics, computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Rice and of pediatrics-neurology at Baylor College of Medicine, will address the topic in both a press briefing and a general session today at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "The question is, 'Can we really trust the discoveries that are currently being made using machine-learning techniques applied to large data sets?'" "The answer in many situations is probably, 'Not without checking,' but work is underway on next-generation machine-learning systems that will assess the uncertainty and reproducibility of their predictions." Machine learning (ML) is a branch of statistics and computer science concerned with building computational systems that learn from data rather than following explicit instructions. Allen said much attention in the ML field has focused on developing predictive models that allow ML to make predictions about future data based on its understanding of data it has studied.

Abductive reasoning generates explanatory hypotheses for new observations using prior knowledge. This paper investigates the use of forgetting, also known as uniform interpolation, to perform ABox abduction in description logic (ALC) ontologies. Non-abducibles are specified by a forgetting signature which can contain concept, but not role, symbols. The resulting hypotheses are semantically minimal and each consist of a set of disjuncts. These disjuncts are each independent explanations, and are not redundant with respect to the background ontology or the other disjuncts, representing a form of hypothesis space. The observations and hypotheses handled by the method can contain both atomic or complex ALC concepts, excluding role assertions, and are not restricted to Horn clauses. Two approaches to redundancy elimination are explored for practical use: full and approximate. Using a prototype implementation, experiments were performed over a corpus of real world ontologies to investigate the practicality of both approaches across several settings.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford responds to a question from Sen. Dianne Feinstein during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on her sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Christine Blasey Ford gave a detailed scientific explanation for her memory of the alleged incident involving Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh at her highly anticipated Senate testimony Thursday. Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pressed Ford over her level of certainty that it was, in fact, Kavanaugh who allegedly pinned her down 36 years ago, while in high school, and attempted to remove her clothing. "How are you so sure that it was he?" Feinstein asked. Ford, a California-based psychology professor, laid out a detailed scientific explanation.

We have seen significant recent progress in pattern analysis and machine intelligence applied to images, audio and video signals, and natural language text, but not as much applied to another artifact produced by people: computer program source code. In a paper to be presented at the FEED Workshop at KDD 2018, we showcase a system that makes progress towards the semantic analysis of code. By doing so, we provide the foundation for machines to truly reason about program code and learn from it. The work, also recently demonstrated at IJCAI 2018, is conceived and led by IBM Science for Social Good fellow Evan Patterson and focuses specifically on data science software. Data science programs are a special kind of computer code, often fairly short, but full of semantically rich content that specifies a sequence of data transformation, analysis, modeling, and interpretation operations.

WASHINGTON – Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday he is willing to talk directly with North Korea in a bid to resolve the festering issue of abductions of Japanese citizens and foster better ties with Pyongyang. "I wish to directly face North Korea and talk with them so that the abduction problem can be resolved quickly," Abe said at a joint press conference with President Donald Trump. The U.S. leader promised to raise the highly sensitive issue of the Japanese nationals kidnapped by Pyongyang in the 1970s and 1980s with Kim Jong Un at next week's high-stakes summit in Singapore. Abe added there was no change in Japan's policy to pursue "real peace in Northeast Asia" and that if North Korea "is willing to take steps" in the right direction, it will have a "bright future."

Hi there, could you tell us a little about Benevolent AI and your motivations as a company?

Our work extends Juba’s formulation of learning abductive reasoning from examples, in which both the relative plausibility of various explanations, as well as which explanations are valid, are learned directly from data. We extend the formulation to consider partially observed examples, along with declarative background knowledge about the missing data. We show that it is possible to use implicitly learned rules together with the explicitly given declarative knowledge to support hypotheses in the course of abduction. We observe that when a small explanation exists, it is possible to obtain a much-improved guarantee in the challenging exception-tolerant setting.

Juba recently proposed a formulation of learning abductive reasoning from examples, in which both the relative plausibility of various explanations, as well as which explanations are valid, are learned directly from data. The main shortcoming of this formulation of the task is that it assumes access to full-information (i.e., fully specified) examples; relatedly, it offers no role for declarative background knowledge, as such knowledge is rendered redundant in the abduction task by complete information. In this work we extend the formulation to utilize such partially specified examples, along with declarative background knowledge about the missing data. We show that it is possible to use implicitly learned rules together with the explicitly given declarative knowledge to support hypotheses in the course of abduction. We also show how to use knowledge in the form of graphical causal models to refine the proposed hypotheses. Finally, we observe that when a small explanation exists, it is possible to obtain a much-improved guarantee in the challenging exception-tolerant setting. Such small, human-understandable explanations are of particular interest for potential applications of the task.

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