Venue: Thompson Board Room
IEE
Savoy Place
London
(Nearest Tube: Embankment and Waterloo)
Attendance is free and open to all members and non-members of SGES.
Speaker: Prof John Fox (Imperial Cancer Research Fund)
Title: Intelligent agents which reason about beliefs, decisions and plans: logical foundations and practical applications
Abstract: Over the last ten years or so the ICRF has pursued a research programme on "intelligent" agents, and decision support systems in clinical medicine. Among the topics we have investigated are: reasoning under uncertainty; forecasting and risk assessment; medical image interpretation; knowledge representation, and architectures for autonomous systems. These lines of work have come together in a novel theory of decision making and plan management which exploits ideas from classical and non-classical logics; PROforma, a knowledge representation language based on this theory, and a set of software tools for authoring and executing applications in PROforma. This technology was developed to address medical problems but is based on general principles which can be applied in many other fields. The talk will review the research background to PROforma and discuss a number of applications.
Biography: John Fox trained as a cognitive scientist in the UK and USA. He joined the staff of the UK's Medical Research Council in 1975 and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 1981, where he established the Advanced Computation Laboratory. This laboratory has wide interests in AI but has always had a particular commitment to logic programming concepts and technologies. The ACL is unusual in that it deliberatly seeks synergy between first-class academic research and challenging real-world applications in medicine, and has lead a variety of UK and EU-funded projects resulting in practical applications and basic research contributions. John Fox has published over 100 papers and books in cognitive science, computer science and medicine and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Knowledge Engineering Review published by Cambridge University Press.
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