Study-Unit Description

Study-Unit Description


CODE ICS1019

 
TITLE Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

 
UM LEVEL 01 - Year 1 in Modular Undergraduate Course

 
MQF LEVEL 5

 
ECTS CREDITS 5

 
DEPARTMENT Artificial Intelligence

 
DESCRIPTION Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a core area of study in Artificial Intelligence. Many problems that need an AI solution require knowledge to be represented, manipulated, and reasoned about. Knowledge may be critical to being able to derive a solution for many problems that require knowledge about the real world or a domain, and the choice of knowledge representation may drive the success or failure of the approach. Reasoning with knowledge is frequently necessary to derive new knowledge and/or deduce or infer facts.

Some similarity with logic programming and foundations of artificial intelligence is assumed. This study-unit introduces formal aspects of knowledge representation and reasoning, including a number of logic based formalisms for knowledge representations.

In this study-unit, we investigate attempts to represent commonsense and scientific knowledge, and modelling concepts. The field of case-based reasoning - as a paradigm for combining problem-solving and learning, will also be introduced.

In addition, the study-unit will include an introduction to the concept of Ontology, as a computational artefact that encodes knowledge about a domain in a machine-processable form to enable intelligent agents to manipulate and reason about this encoded knowledge.

We will also briefly cover approaches to knowledge acquisition (to be covered in more detail in Knowledge Discovery and Management).

Study-unit Aims:

To provide students with an understanding of logic and logic-based knowledge representation formalisms, ontologies, and their theoretical and practical aspects, some relevant reasoning services, and how these are used to support modelling.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Knowledge & Understanding:
By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to:

- define and describe knowledge representation, its motivations, applicability advantages and pitfalls;
- describe and categorise some basic KR formalisms namely first-order and description logics;
- explain how automated reasoning can be used to help with modeling.

2. Skills:
By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to:

- apply the basic range of techniques for building knowledge representations using standard tooling;
- analyse and compare different knowledge representations for specific tasks;
- design ontologies;
- evaluate knowledge representation techniques.

Textbooks:

- Ronald J. Brachman and Hector J. Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Morgan Kaufmann, 2004.
- Franz Baader, Diego Calvanese, Deborah McGuinness, Daniele Nardi, Peter Patel-Schneider, The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Other selected papers and materials will be made available through the VLE.

 
RULES/CONDITIONS Before TAKING THIS UNIT YOU MUST TAKE ICS1020

 
ADDITIONAL NOTES Students taking this study-unit need to have a technical background.

 
STUDY-UNIT TYPE Lecture

 
METHOD OF ASSESSMENT
Assessment Component/s Assessment Due Sept. Asst Session Weighting
Project SEM2 Yes 30%
Examination (2 Hours) SEM2 Yes 70%

 
LECTURER/S Matthew Montebello

 

 
The University makes every effort to ensure that the published Courses Plans, Programmes of Study and Study-Unit information are complete and up-to-date at the time of publication. The University reserves the right to make changes in case errors are detected after publication.
The availability of optional units may be subject to timetabling constraints.
Units not attracting a sufficient number of registrations may be withdrawn without notice.
It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2024/5. It may be subject to change in subsequent years.

https://www.um.edu.mt/course/studyunit