JAIST Logic@JAIST

Towards a Science of Computing

  • Prof. Robert Kowalski

  • Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Research Fellow
    Imperial College London

  • Website
Date: 2014/10/28 (Tue) 15:10 to 16:40
Place: IS lecture room
Group: Logic Unit
As a scientific discipline, the field of Computing today lacks a unifying framework. It consists, instead, of diverse languages, tools and techniques in the mostly disjoint areas of programming, databases, and artificial intelligence. But, despite this diversity, it is possible to identify a number of similar features lying beneath the surface. These features include such notions as states and state transitions, declarative and procedural representations, external events and internally generated actions, active versus goal-oriented behaviour, and hierarchical organisation of structures and procedures. In my talk, I will highlight some of these similarities, in such different frameworks for Computing as logic programming, production systems, agent-oriented programming, active databases, action languages in AI, abstract state machines and other models of computation. I will argue that it is possible to unify many of the most important features of these frameworks, and to combine them in a single logic-based framework that can be applied to all areas of Computing.
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