Robert Kowalski

Infobox Scientist


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name = Robert Anthony Kowalski
birth_date = Birth date and age|1941|5|15|mf=y
birth_place = Bridgeport, Connecticut
death_date =
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citizenship = Naturalised British Citizen
nationality = British
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field = Logic
Computer Science
work_institution = University of Edinburgh
Imperial College London
alma_mater =
doctoral_advisor = Bernard Meltzer
doctoral_students = David Warren
Christopher Hogger
Keith Clark
Marek Sergot
George Pollard
Christopher Moss
Fariba Sadri
Kave Eshghi
Jin-Sang Kim
David Frost
Suryanarayana Sripada
Francis McCabe
Francesca Toni
Tze Ho Fung
Gerhard Wetzel
Jacinto Davila
Christopher Preist
Yongyuth Perpoontanalarp
known_for = Logic programming
Event calculus
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Robert "Bob" Anthony Kowalski (born May 15, 1941, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, U.S.) is a logician and computer scientist, of Polish descent, who has spent most of his career in the UK.

He was educated at the University of Chicago, University of Bridgeport (BA in mathematics, 1963), Stanford University (MSc in mathematics, 1966), University of Warsaw and the University of Edinburgh (PhD in computer science, 1970). He was a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (1970–75) and has been at Imperial College London since 1975, attaining a chair in Computational Logic in 1982 and becoming Emeritus Professor in 1999. He was inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1991, of the European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence in 1999, and the Association for Computing Machinery in 2001.

He began his research in the field of automated theorem-proving, developing both SL-resolution [Kowalski, R. and Kuehner, D., "Linear Resolution with Selection Function", in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2, 1971, pp. 227-60. Reprinted in Anthology of Automated Theorem-Proving Papers, Vol. 2, Springer-Verlag, 1983, pp. 542-577.] with Donald Kuehner and the connection graph proof procedure [Kowalski, R., "A Proof Procedure Using Connection Graphs", in JACM Vol. 22, No. 4, 1975, pp. 572-595.] . However, he is best known for his contributions to the development of logic programming, starting with the procedural interpretation of Horn clauses [Kowalski, R., "Predicate Logic as Programming Language", in Proceedings IFIP Congress, Stockholm, North Holland Publishing Co., 1974, pp. 569-574. Reprinted in Computers for Artificial Intelligence Applications, (eds. Wah, B. and Li, G.-J.), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Angeles, 1986, pp. 68-73.] . He also developed the minimal model and the fixpoint semantics of Horn clauses with Maarten van Emden [van Emden, M. and Kowalski, R., "The Semantics of Predicate Logic as a Programming Language", in JACM , Vol. 23, No. 4, 1976, pp. 733-742.] . With Marek Sergot, he developed both the event calculus [Kowalski, R. and Sergot, M., "A Logic-based Calculus of Events", in New Generation Computing, Vol. 4, No.1, February 1986, pp. 67-95. Also in Knowledge Base Management-Systems, (eds. C. Thanos and J. W. Schmidt), Springer-Verlag, pp. 23-51. Also in The Language of Time: A Reader (eds. Inderjeet Mani, J. Pustejovsky, and R. Gaizauskas) Oxford University Press. 2005.] and the application of logic programming to legal reasoning [Sergot, M., Sadri, F., Kowalski, R., Kriwaczek, F., Hammond, P., and Cory, T., "The British Nationality Act as a Logic Program", in CACM, Vol. 29, No. 5, 1986, pp. 370-386.] [Kowalski, R., "Legislation as Logic Programs", in Logic Programming in Action (eds. G. Comyn, N. E. Fuchs, M. J. Ratcliffe), Springer-Verlag, 1992, pp.203-230.] . With Fariba Sadri, he developed an agent model [Kowalski, R., "Using Metalogic to Reconcile Reactive with Rational Agents" In Meta-Logics and Logic Programming (K. Apt and F. Turini, eds,) MIT Press, 1995.] [Kowalski, R. and Sadri, F., " From Logic Programming towards Multi-agent Systems, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence , Volume 25 (1999), pp. 391-419.] in which beliefs are represented by logic programs and goals are represented by integrity constraints.

Kowalski was one of the early developers of Abductive Logic Programming, in which logic programs are augmented with integrity constraints and with undefined, abducible predicates [Eshghi, K.,and Kowalski, R., "Abduction through deduction". Department of Computing, Imperial College, 1988.] [Kakas, T., Kowalski, K. and Toni, F., "Abductive Logic Programming". Journal of Logic and Computation, 1992, Vol. 2 No. 6, pp. 719-770.] . This work led to the demonstration with Phan Minh Dung and Francesca Toni that most logics for default reasoning can be regarded as special cases of assumption-based argumentation [Bondarenko, A., Dung, P. M., Kowalski, R., and Toni, F. " An Abstract Argumentation-theoretic Approach to Default Reasoning". Journal of Artificial Intelligence 93 (1-2), 1997, pp 63-101.] [Dung, P. M., Kowalski, R., and Toni, F. “Dialectic proof procedures for assumption-based, admissible argumentation". Journal of Artificial Intelligence 170(2), February 2006, pp. 114-159.] .

ee also

* Logic programming
* Prolog
* event calculus

Notes

External links

* [http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/ Robert Kowalski's home page]
* [http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/history.html Biography]
* [http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/CV.pdf Biography] (PDF)
* [http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mjs/publications/BobPortrait.pdf Biographical Essay]

Persondata
NAME= Kowalski, Robert Anthony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES= Kowalski, Bob
SHORT DESCRIPTION= British computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH= May 15, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH= Bridgeport, Connecticut
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=