Logic meets Learning: From Aristotle to Neural Networks
Abstract:
The tension between deduction and induction is perhaps the most fundamental issue in areas such as philosophy, cognition and artificial intelligence.
In this talk, we survey work that provides evidence for the long-standing and deep connections between logic and learning.
After a brief historical prelude, our narrative is then structured in terms of three strands of interaction:
logic versus learning, machine learning for logic, and logic for machine learning, but with ample overlap.
Bio:
Dr Vaishak Belle is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He is an Alan Turing Institute Faculty Fellow, a Royal Society University Research Fellow, and a member of the RSE (Royal Society of Edinburgh) Young Academy of Scotland. He was previously at KU Leuven (Belgium), University of Toronto (Canada), Aachen University of Technology (Germany) and University of Trento (Italy).
At the University of Edinburgh, he directs a research lab on artificial intelligence, specialising in the unification of logic and machine learning, with a recent emphasis on explainability and ethics. Along with his co-authors, he has won the Microsoft best paper award at UAI, the Machine learning journal best student paper award at ECML-PKDD, and the Machine learning journal best student paper award at ILP. In 2014, he received a silver medal by the Kurt Goedel Society.