KALANTARI@RED.RUTGERS.EDU.UUCP (01/27/87)
RUTGERS COMPUTER SCIENCE AND RUTCOR COLLOQUIUM SCHEDULE - SPRING 1987 Computer Science Department Colloquium : DATE: Thursday, January 29, 1987 SPEAKER: Leora Morgenstern AFFILIATION: New York University TITLE: Foundations of a Logic of Knowledge, Action, and Communication TIME: 9:50 (Coffee and Cookies will be setup at 9:30) PLACE: Hill Center, Room 705 Most AI planners work on the assumption that they have complete knowledge of their problem domain and situation, so that formulating a plan consists of searching through some pre-packaged list of action operators for an action sequence that achieves some desired goal. Real life planning rarely works this way because we usually don't have enough information to map out a detailed plan of action when we start out. Instead, we initially draw up a sketchy plan and fill in details as we proceed and gain more exact information about the world. This talk will present a formalism that is expressive enough to describe this flexible planning process. We begin by discussing the various requirements that such a formalism must meet, and present a syntactic theory of knowledge that meets these requirements. We discuss the paradoxes, such as the Knower Paradox, that arise from syntactic treatments of knowledge, and propose a solution to these paradoxes based on Kripke's solution to the Liar Paradox. Next, we present a theory of action that is powerful enough to describe partial plans and joint-effort plans. We demonstrate that we can integrate this theory with an Austinian and Searlian theory of communicative acts. Finally, we give solutions to the Knowledge Preconditions and Ignorant Agent Problems as part of our integrated theory of planning. The talk will include comparisons of our theory with other syntactic and modal theories such as Konolige's and Moore's. We will demonstrate that our theory is powerful enough to solve classes of problems that these theories cannot handle.