Guest Talk: Vaishak Belle: Logic & Learning: From Aristotle to Neural Networks

Wednesday, November 24, 2021, 11:30am

Location: Online Session
Zoom meeting
Meeting ID: 920 4794 9381 
Password: unravel

Speaker: Vaishak Belle

 

Abstract: 

The tension between deduction and induction is perhaps the most fundamental issue in areas such as philosophy, cognition and artificial intelligence (AI). The deduction camp concerns itself with questions about the expressiveness of formal languages for capturing knowledge about the world, together with proof systems for reasoning from such knowledge bases. The learning camp attempts to generalize from examples about partial descriptions about the world. In AI, historically, these camps have loosely divided the development of the field, but advances in cross-over areas such as statistical relational learning, neuro-symbolic systems, and high-level control have illustrated that the dichotomy is not very constructive, and perhaps even ill-formed. In this talk, we briefly survey work that provides further evidence for the connections between logic and learning. Our narrative is structured in terms of three strands: logic versus learning, machine learning for logic, and logic for machine learning, but with ample overlap.