Christian Freksa

The paradoxical success of fuzzy logic

Fuzzy logic methods have been used successfully in many real-world applications, but the foundations of fuzzy logic remain under attack. Taken together, these two facts constitute a paradox. A second paradox is that almost all of the successful fuzzy logic applications are embedded controllers, while most of the theoretical papers on fuzzy methods deal with knowledge representation and reasoning. I hope to resolve these paradoxes by identifying which aspects of fuzzy logic render it useful in practice, and which aspects are inessential. My conclusions are based on a mathematical result, on a survey of literature on the use of fuzzy logic in heuristic control and in expert systems, and on practical experience in developing expert systems.<<ETX>>

Spatial Cognition: Reasoning, Action, Interaction

The Transregional Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition pursues interdisciplinary research on a broad range of topics related to the representation and processing mechanisms for intelligent spatial behavior in technical and in natural systems. This contribution gives an overview of the field of research worked on in the SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition and presents three representative examples that illustrate the activities in the three research areas Reasoning, Action, and Interaction.

Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning in the SparQ-toolbox

A multitude of calculi for qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) have been proposed during the last two decades. The number of practical applications that make use of QSR techniques is, however, comparatively small. One reason for this may be seen in the difficulty for people from outside the field to incorporate the required reasoning techniques into their software. Sometimes, proposed calculi are only partially specified and implementations are rarely available. With the SparQ toolbox presented in this text, we seek to improve this situation by making common calculi and standard reasoning techniques accessible in a way that allows for easy integration into applications. We hope to turn this into a community effort and encourage researchers to incorporate their calculi into SparQ. This text is intended to present SparQ to potential users and contributors and to provide an overview on its features and utilization.

The Cognitive Reality of Schematic Maps

In graphics and language, schematisation is an important method to emphasize certain aspects and to deemphasize others. Different disciplines use schematisation for different reasons. In cartography, graphic schematisation is one aspect of map generalisation. In contrast, cognitive science addresses schematisation as a method to intentionally emphasize certain aspects of knowledge beyond technical necessity; therefore, the notion of schematic map is proposed to denote maps that employ schematisation for cognitive representational reasons. This chapter discusses different views of schematisation from cartography, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Connections to qualitative reasoning in artificial intelligence are drawn. We address human spatial cognition and present examples of task-oriented representations. Finally, multimodality for conveying spatial knowledge and its application in schematic maps are discussed.

You‐are‐here maps in emergencies –the danger of getting lost

This article evaluates criteria for the design of so‐called You‐Are‐Here (YAH) maps, i.e. maps that explicitly indicate the position of the map reader. Established design criteria are rendered more precise and applied in an exemplary assessment of three YAH maps as they can be found in public buildings as part of a general emergency scheme. The clarification of the YAH map terminology is necessary to allow for assessing the quality of existing YAH maps and consolidates the basis of rule‐based generation of location‐aware information services. Possibilities for further empirical evaluation of YAH maps are discussed and the role of location‐aware technology is considered for smart mobile systems and smart environments.

KI 2006: Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Session 1. Invited Talk.- Expressivity-Preserving Tempo Transformation for Music - A Case-Based Approach.- Session 2. Cognition and Emotion.- MicroPsi: Contributions to a Broad Architecture of Cognition.- Affective Cognitive Modeling for Autonomous Agents Based on Scherers Emotion Theory.- Session 3A. Semantic Web.- OWL and Qualitative Reasoning Models.- Techniques for Fast Query Relaxation in Content-Based Recommender Systems.- Session 3B. Analogy.- Solving Proportional Analogies by E-Generalization.- Building Robots with Analogy-Based Anticipation.- Session 4A. Natural Language.- Classification of Skewed and Homogenous Document Corpora with Class-Based and Corpus-Based Keywords.- Learning an Ensemble of Semantic Parsers for Building Dialog-Based Natural Language Interfaces.- Session 4B. Reasoning.- Game-Theoretic Agent Programming in Golog Under Partial Observability.- Finding Models for Blocked 3-SAT Problems in Linear Time by Systematical Refinement of a Sub-model.- Towards the Computation of Stable Probabilistic Model Semantics.- DiaWOz-II - A Tool for Wizard-of-Oz Experiments in Mathematics.- Session 5. Invited Talk.- Applications of Automated Reasoning.- Session 6A. Ontologies.- On the Scalability of Description Logic Instance Retrieval.- Relation Instantiation for Ontology Population Using the Web.- Session 6B. Spatio-temporal Reasoning.- GeTS - A Specification Language for Geo-Temporal Notions.- Active Monte Carlo Recognition.- Session 7A. Machine Learning.- Cross System Personalization and Collaborative Filtering by Learning Manifold Alignments.- A Partitioning Method for Mixed Feature-Type Symbolic Data Using a Squared Euclidean Distance.- Session 7B. Spatial Reasoning.- On Generalizing Orientation Information in .- Towards the Visualisation of Shape Features The Scope Histogram.- Session 8A. Robot Learning.- A Robot Learns to Know People-First Contacts of a Robot.- Recombinant Rule Selection in Evolutionary Algorithm for Fuzzy Path Planner of Robot Soccer.- Session 8B. Classical AI Problems.- A Framework for Quasi-exact Optimization Using Relaxed Best-First Search.- Gray Box Robustness Testing of Rule Systems.- A Unifying Framework for Hybrid Planning and Scheduling.- Session 9. Agents.- A Hybrid Time Management Approach to Agent-Based Simulation.- Adaptive Multi-agent Programming in GTGolog.- Agent Logics as Program Logics: Grounding KARO.- On the Relationship Between Playing Rationally and Knowing How to Play: A Logical Account.- Special Event. 50 Years Artificial Intelligence.- 1956-1966 How Did It All Begin? - Issues Then and Now.- Fundamental Questions.- Towards the AI Summer.- History of AI in Germany and The Third Industrial Revolution.- Three Decades of Human Language Technology in Germany.- 1996-2006 Autonomous Robots.- Projects and Vision in Robotics.- What Will Happen in Algorithm Country?.

Spatial Computing for Design—an Artificial Intelligence Perspective

The articulation of the Science of Design by Herbert Simon and the paradigmatic relevance of Artificial Intelligence in that context are closely intertwined topics: Simon elaborates the ‘Sciences of the Artificial’ in the context of the design of artefacts. Situated in this AI-centric view of design, we characterize “spatial computing for design” as a specialisation concerned with the development of the general representational and computational apparatus necessary for solving modelling and reasoning problems in spatial design. Several representation and reasoning problems are dis-cussed in the backdrop of relevant examples involving the formal modelling of structural form with respect to a desired/anticipated artefactual function. The discussion, although applicable to any spatial design activity, is grounded in the domain of assistive decision-support in the context of a conventional computer-aided architecture design workflow.

Qualitative Spatial Reasoning about Relative Position

Qualitative knowledge about relative orientation can be expressed in form of ternary point relations. In this paper we present a calculus based on ternary relations. It utilises finer distinctions than previously published calculi. It permits differentiations which are useful in realistic application scenarios that cannot directly be dealt with in coarser calculi. There is a price to pay for the advanced options: useful mathematical results for coarser calculi do not hold for the new calculus. This tradeoff is demonstrated by a direct comparison of the new calculus with the flip-flop calculus.

Contrast sets in spatial and temporal language

How do speakers choose suitable words for a description, and how do recipients identify the intended interpretation out of the wide range of (partly overlapping) meanings as defined in a dictionary or encyclopedia? Spatial and temporal terms such as left, front, before, after, long, wide, in, and out are particularly intriguing as they involve not only an intricate relationship to the spatiotemporal context and its mental conceptualization, but also a vast potential for extended (e.g., metaphorical) meanings. Furthermore, they are typically associated with relative and qualitative, rather than absolute or quantitative metric concepts, allowing for a great variety of interpretations. A lexical item like long, for example, may be conceived of as the opposite of short; but the absolute size of the entity referred to remains unspecified. Furthermore, long may also be interpreted as contrasting with wide or broad, or it may specify linearity rather than extendedness, and it could be similar in meaning to big or tall. Additionally, it may refer to spatial as well as temporal or further extended domains, as in a long text. As this example indicates, a central aspect of interpreting the meaning of utterances lies in identifying those aspects that the utterance contrasts with, ruling out conceivable alternatives. As Nemo (1999, p. 353) points out: ‘‘what is said (or asked) is relevant insofar as it makes a difference’’, namely, a difference to the set of alternatives that the utterance distinguishes. This aspect of linguistic communication has been widely discussed and investigated from a number of perspectives as part of various theoretical approaches to the semantics/pragmatics interface, for example, Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985), and Alternative Semantics which extends the idea to claims of truth-conditional effects, cf. Rooth (1992). In this theory-neutral contribution, we apply the general idea to the interpretation of spatial and temporal language in order to specify how differences in the contextual contrast sets inform the interpretation of a particular subclass of linguistic items, namely, spatial and temporal terms.

Region-Based Representation for Assistance with Spatio-Temporal Planning in Unfamiliar Environments

In this contribution we present a cognitively motivated approach to an interactive assistance system for spatio-temporal planning tasks. Since mental spatial problem solving is known to be based on hierarchical representations, we argue for region-based representation structures that allow for structuring a complex spatio-temporal problem such that exploring and communicating alternative solutions to a given problem are easily enabled. In this way, spatio-temporal constraints can interactively be dealt with to find appropriate solutions for a given planning problem.