This award will support collaboration in logic programming between US groups, including students, at SUNY Stony Brook and Southern Methodist University, led by Terrance Swift of SUNY Stony Brook, and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, led by Professor Luis Moniz Pereira. They will create a sequential engine capable of performing central aspects of non-monotonic reasoning to develop a robust, scalable, freely-available system that will make possible the use of logic programming for such applications such as diagnosis, planning, and hypothetical reasoning over databases. They also propose to develop a distributed version of XSB combined with PVM-Prolog to form a system capable of performing non-monotonic reasoning in a distributed, agent-like environment. The USB-SMU group has strengths in the fundamental theory of computational logic and in implementing these theories in usable logic-based systems. The UniNova group has strengths in the theoretical development of expressive logic systems with negation and in the application of these systems to real-world problems. They share an interest in implementation and evaluation strategies. Both groups have begun to explore, in different ways, distributed non- monotonic reasoning, which will address situations in which the knowledge itself is distributed, and will model agent- like argumentation systems that can share knowledge non- monotonically. The US group will provide efficient implementation of expressive systems, the Portuguese, an expansion of the utility of the US systems, through increased expressiveness and new applications.
