Logic & Cognitive Systems Research Group:
The long-term goal is the development of an embodied cognitive agent that interacts intelligently with its environment, and communicates its beliefs, actions, and observations in natural language.
Two main outcomes are expected from this work: getting a deeper understanding of human cognition and language competence, and producing intelligent artifacts for various applications of robotics. We pursue this project making use of the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning and acting system of Shapiro et al. Our research moves in three main, parallel directions:
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First, there are research problems, falling under the umbrella of cognitive robotics, of an agent's reasoning about its perception and action. These give rise to issues of reasoning about fallible perception, causal reasoning, counterfactual reasoning, belief, time, and belief change.
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Second, we address problems related to embodied linguistic competence and its link to acting. Chief among these are issues related to indexical, event ontologies, and the appropriate linguistic generation of causal reports.
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Third, we continue to develop and enhance both the theory and the implementation of the SNePS system. In particular we focus on (i) issues of efficient reasoning and some combinatorial problems it gives rise to: (ii) the development of more expressive, and psychologically plausible, variants of the representation language of SNePS; (iii) the problems of matching and unification in said variants, and (iv) modular and efficient implementations of the system.