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Freie Universität Bozen

In the picture from left: Oliver Kutz, Guendalina Righetti und Nicolas Troquard from unibz. 

unibz news

Best paper for an (im)possible event

Have you ever wondered whether you could throw a dice endlessly, forever, and never throw a 6? Mathematics will tell you that this is a possible event, but it will never happen. A research that received the best research paper award.

Roberto Confalonieri, Pietro Galliani, Oliver Kutz, Daniele Porello, Guendalina Righetti and Nicolas Troquard won the Springer-sponsored Best Paper Award for their article "Almost certain termination for ALC weakening" at the 21st EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

They won it for their theory on the possible event where the probability of it is 0 - it is "almost certain" not to happen, as the mathematician would put it. This effect can manifest itself in many disguises, both in everyday life and in Artificial Intelligence algorithms. 

In their paper "Almost certain termination for ALC weakening", the group of authors from the unibz together with their colleagues from Padova and Genova considered the problem of steering an Artificial Intelligence program meant to weaken possibly inconsistent knowledgebases through an infinite space of possibilities.

Such weakening of knowledge has many applications, for instance in machine learning, knowledge repair, or computational creativity.  

The group from the department of Computer Science of unibz proposed a new algorithmic and probabilistic approach and demonstrated that solutions to making information consistent again can be found "almost certainly", in this award winning paper at the 21st EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 22 took place at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, August 31-September 2, 2022.

(vic)