Abstract:

In planning and action languages the notion of progressing an initial database
when actions are performed plays an important role. A classical example is
STRIPS with its add and delete lists. While progression can be done efficiently
when the database consists only of literals (as in STRIPS) the general picture
is more complicated. In fact, Lin and Reiter showed that progression needs
second-order logic in general. In this talk, I will review the idea of
progression in the context of the situation calculus and discuss recent results
on first-order progression, including cases where the progressed database can be
computed efficiently.

Gerhard Lakemeyer's Bio:
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Gerhard Lakemeyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in
1990. After six years at the University of Bonn he joined the faculty of the
Department of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University, where he heads the
Knowledge-Based Systems Group. His research interests include knowledge
representation and cognitive robotics. He has published more than one hundred
scientific papers and has served on numerous program committees. He is an ECCAI
fellow and a member of the Editorial Board of Artificial Intelligence,
Computational Intelligence, and the Journal of Applied Logic, and a member of
the Advisory Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.