Department of Computer Science 8
Artificial Intelligence
History
The AI department was founded with the appointment of
Prof. Dr. H. Stoyan. Prof. Dr.-Ing. G. Görz was appointed to the
C3 position on April 1st, 1991. Since 1997,
apl. Prof. Dr. Volker Strehl is also member of the chair.
Until the liquidation of the "Bayerisches Forschungszentrum
für wissensbasierte Systeme" (Bavarian Research Center for
Knowledge-based Systems, FORWISS), the research group "Wissenserwerb" (knowledge acquisition) was
affiliated to our chair.
Research
When the chair was founded, the following research topics were
defined: AI-programming languages and methods, knowledge
representation and knowledge processing, and natural language
processing. The first topic is currently fading in the research
community; however, our works in the extension of logic
programming and distributed implementation of reason maintenance
systems are have contributed to close a current research gap.
The theoretical orientation of the chair is now also
represented in the working areas computer algebra and algebraic
combinatorics. In this areas, algorithms for symbolic summation,
the algorithmic treatment of recurrences and identities, and
formal power series are studied. Furthermore, combinatoric
aspects of orderded structures and computer-based generation and
enumeration of combinatoric objects are researched.
Meanwhile, also motivated by new insights in the area of
knowledge acquisition, a new focus of our work has emerged:
Application of AI in engineering sciences, medicine, and
(science of) history.
An important role there is played by the integration of
methods of applied logic, knowledge representation, and
knowledge processing in multimedia systems and digital
libraries. These methods become more and more relevant for
modeling multimedia content and developing tools to create
digital documents. The most important application field is
technical documentation in engineering sciences; as
supplementary areas, medicine, history, cartography, and digital
libraries are made accessible. Further areas in this field
include methods of knowledge acquisition, formulation of
knowledge reconstruction, and the definition of norm languages.
Another emphasis is the adaption of AI methods to knowledge management (KM).
We have gained experience in the fields of knowledge elicitation, knowledge discovery,
knowledge documentation, knowledge fusion in the context of real-world knowledge management projects.
Prof. Stoyan is heading the working committee Arbeitskreis Wissensmanagement Mittelfranken,
which serves as an exchange platform for theoretical and practical approaches to KM.
Natural language processing as a fourth focal point is
challenged in a new way in the context of robust dialog
systems. Basic research on dialogs aims at developing a flexible
adaptive dialog modul which will, together with an application
modeling in description logics, be used for various natural
language dialog and assistance systems.
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