Professor Marco Colombetti, Politecnico di Milano and Universitý della Svizzera italiana

Title: "Describing Events and Actions in First-Order Temporal Logic"

Current logical systems for reasoning about action typically use some version of modal or dynamic logic to describe events and actions. Such systems have fairly complex model and proof theory, and as a consequence most practitioners of artificial intelligence and agent-based programming simply ignore them. I suggest that first-order logic, integrated with a sufficiently powerful temporal logic, can be sufficient for many applications involving the representation of events and actions. In particular I suggest that adopting a clear distinction between event types and event tokens gives first-order temporal logic strong expressive power. Marco Colombetti is professor of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering at the Department of Electronics and Information of Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and at the Institute of Communication Technologies of Universitý della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland. He is currently visiting the Information Science Department of the University of Otago as William Evans Fellow.

Slides may be viewed here