Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Research Visitors

• Nov. 2016 (1 week). Visit of Elena Botoeva (Univ. of Bolzano), Stanislav Kikot (London Univ.), Roman Kontchakov (London Univ.) Vladislav Rhyzhikov (Univ. of Bolzano), and Michael Zakharyaschev (London Univ.) to work on the complexity on ontology-mediated query answering with description logics and linear existential rules. Seminars: “Query Inseparability of Description Logic Knowledge Bases and TBoxes” by Elena Botoeva and “The Complexity of Ontology-Based Data Access with OWL 2 QL and Bounded Treewidth Queries” by Stanislav Kikot.

• Nov. 2016 (2 days). Visit of Sebastian Rudolph (TU Dresden) in the context of Swan Rocher's PhD defense. Seminar: “The Curse of Finiteness: Undecidability of Database-Inspired Reasoning Problems in Very Expressive Description Logics”.

• Sept. 2016 (1 week) Visit of Ricardo Rodriguez (Univ. of Buenos Aires) to work on belief revision for inconsistent tolerant semantics.

• In collaboration with Ulle Endriss (Institute for Logic, Language and Computation), he worked on the link between argumentation theory and social choice. The aim of this work was to study and understand how Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (stating that there is no democratic voting rule) could be avoided thanks to deliberation and argumentation. More precisely, the favored approach was to define a formal framework of the deliberation process predating a vote, and to establish conditions under which deliberation may help to output a democratic and collectively rational choice through the notion of preference structuration, i.e.,the changes in preferences that the agents may undergo after discussion.

Rallou Thomopoulos was invited at Laval University (Québec, Canada) for one year until July 2016. She worked on two projects dealing with decision support:

• An academic project conducted with the Computer Science Division of Laval University. It aimed at conceiving a systematic approach to assess several scenarios in agriculture, by combining a qualitative model based on argumentation and a quantitative simulation technique based on system dynamics.

• The second project was conducted both with a private partner and with the Operation and Decision Division of Laval University. It aimed to provide explanations for automatically-computed instructions, to improve human understanding of the situation. These instructions were the results of a commercial software used for real-time decision support for the flow management of a combined and sanitary wastewater system.