Tool-assisted Fault Discovery in Knowledge Bases: A Novel Approach from Klagenfurt

Artificial intelligence systems — for instance, in biomedicine — are often based on knowledge bases, which store expert knowledge in machine readable form. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon that mistakes creep in while knowledge bases are created. Such mistakes can have serious consequences, for example, if the system suggests a wrong medication for a patient. Finding such faults is, however, a very hard task, often just because of the sheer size of the knowledge bases.

For this reason, a team of researchers from the Department of Applied Informatics has developed the “OntoDebug” tool, which is used by people from all over the world. In an article that was recently published in the prestigious “Knowledge-Based Systems” journal, the usefulness of this tool could be scientifically validated by means of several user studies. In particular, it was shown that the effort needed for the discovery of faults in knowledge bases is significantly reduced when OntoDebug is used.

Lizenz: Creative Commons License

For more information on OntoDebug, please check out here.

Topic for a Master Thesis in Information Management

The following topic is offered at the Department of Applied Informatics:

“Analysis and design of an information and communication platform based on Confluence”

Web-based tools for information collection, information exchange and communication are nowadays common in many organisations. Typical examples are knowledge management systems, corporate wikis, discussion forums or file exchange systems.

Smaller companies are, however, often confronted with the problem that commercial solutions offer too much functionality for the planned use; at the same time, these system can only be adapted to the organisational requirements with some effort.

In the context of the master thesis the software system “Confluence” by the company Atlassian will be examined regarding its usability and applicability for a start-up company in the area of political and economic strategy development and communication. The expected result of the master thesis is a study of possible applications, limitations and alternatives to the mentioned software solution.

The topic is suitable for students of Information Management. Alternatively, the topic can also be worked on in the frame of  a “Praxis” (Section 6.1 of the curriculum).

For further information, please contact Prof. Dietmar Jannach, Research Group Information Systems.

ÖGAI Award 2013-2016 for Patrick Rodler

Congratulations:  Patrick Rodler was awarded in January 2018 with the  Recognition Award of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence 2013-2016 (ÖGAI) for his outstanding master thesis “A Theory of Interactive Debugging of Knowledge Bases in Monotonic Logics”.

The Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence awards the ÖGAI-Award for the best diploma thesis / master thesis in a sub-area of Artificial Intelligence to support young scientists.

(from left to right): Prof. Stefan Woltran (Jury), Patrick Rodler (Winner), Prof. Ernst Buchberger (ÖGAI President), Thomas Krismayer (Winner), Prof. Thomas Eiter (Jury)

Habilitation Colloquium Dr. Erich Teppan

The Institute for Applied Computer Science, Research Group Intelligent Systems and Business Informatics invites you to the habilitation colloquium of Dr. Erich Teppan.

Time: Thursday, 18 January 2018, Start: 14:30 s. t.

Place: AAU, HS 2

Abstract: Constraint answer set programming (CASP) is a family of hybrid approaches integrating answer set programming (ASP) and constraint programming (CP). These hybrid approaches have already proven to be successful in various domains. In this talk the approach of heuristic CASP (HCASP) is presented. In HCASP, ASP is not only used for expressing constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) to be solved by a CP solver, but also for the encoding of search heuristics that are exploited by the CP solver. In particular, the HCASP solver ASCASS (A Simple Constraint Answer Set Solver), which provides novel methods for defining and exploiting search heuristics, is presented.