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.