Conference Report: RuleML+RR

The 2nd International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning RuleML+RR 2018 was held on September 18-21,  2018, at campus Belval of the University of Luxembourg. The conference was organised as one of several collocated events of the Luxembourg Logic for AI Summit 2018 (LuxLogAI 2018, https://luxlogai.uni.lu/, September 17-26, 2018), which was substantially supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR, RESCOM/18/12426287).

The LuxLogAI summit had a special theme: tools and methods for responsible AI. The summit brought together a number of events, including (besides RuleML+RR 2018):

  • the 4th Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence (GCAI 2018), a young international conference series covering all topics in AI;
  • DecisionCAMP 2018, a renowned event series in the field of business rules and decision management technology;
  • the 14th Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2018), a high-level educational initiative devoted to reasoning techniques related to the semantic web, linked data and knowledge graph application scenarios;
  • MIning and REasoning with legal texts (MIREL 2018), an international workshop in the field of legal reasoning;
  • Deduktionstreffen 2018, the annual meeting of the deduction systems chapter of the German Gesellschaft für Informatik;
  • AI: Truth or Dare, a public round table discussion on responsible AI and the European future with high profile panelists from politics, industry and academia;
  • AI and Art, a combination of art exhibitions,  cultural events and discussion sessions;
  • a workshop on self-organising systems and a tutorial on advanced belief change and default entailment.

LuxLogAI 2018 featured a stellar line-up of eleven internationally recognized invited speakers, complemented by regular presentations of research papers.

RuleML+ RR 2018 provided a rich programme, with five keynote talks, two tutorials, a regular program together with several sub-events: an industry track, the 12th International Rule Challenge 2018 , a doctoral consortium and a poster session.

The five keynote presenters were:

  • Hannah Bast (University of Freiburg) presenting  “Efficient and Convenient Search on Very Large Knowledge Bases”
  • Georg Gottlob (University of Oxford) presenting “Vadalog: A Language and System for Knowledge Graphs”
  • Guido Governatori (Data61/CSIRO) presenting  “Modal Rules: Extending Defeasible Logic with Modal Operators”
  • Valeria de Paiva (Nuance Communications) presenting “Bridging Trouble”
  • Philipp Slusallek (Saarland University/DFKI) presenting “Understanding the World with AI: Training and Validating Autonomous Systems Using Synthetic Data’’

Gottlob, de Paiva and Slusallek were each a joint GCAI keynote.

The two tutorials were:

  • LegalRuleML, by Guido Governatori (Data61/CSIRO) and Monica Palmirani (Bologna University)
  • Logic and Smart Contracts, by Bob Kowalski (Imperial College London), Miguel Calejo (logicalcontracts.com) and Fariba Sadri (Imperial College London)

The regular program included ten full research papers and twelve technical communication papers selected from thirty-three submissions. The presentations were grouped in seven sessions: description logic; KR systems and applications;  ontological reasoning; benchmarking; reasoning with modalities; complex event processing; rule system and applications. Presentation abstracts and a selection of slides are available on-line: https://easychair.org/smart-program/LuxLogAI2018/

Information on the various LuxLogAI conference proceedings, including the Springer LNCS proceedings of RuleML+RR 2018, are available at: https://luxlogai.uni.lu/proceedings/

The Doctoral Consortium (DC) consisted of four papers, one of which, the winner of the DC best paper award, was presented as a full research paper and is contained in the RuleML+RR 2018 proceedings. The six presentations and demos of the Rule Challenge addressed diverse areas, like air traffic control regulations, the British “Succession to the Crown Act 2013”, rule mining and ontologies.  The industry track consisted of four invited presentations on the topic of rule languages and AI in industry. It was followed by the highly successful public round table discussion event  “AI: Truth or Dare” at KPMG Luxembourg devoted to Responsible Artificial Intelligence and the European future. This public round table was perhaps one of the main highlights of the LuxLogAI conference. The panel consisted of nine experts in AI from politics, industry and academia, like for instance Viviane Reding, former vice president of the European Union. The event had repercussion in the media, see https://today.rtl.lu/media/vox-pops/1243397.html. The poster session of RuleML+RR was combined with that of the Deduktionstreffen, and consisted of seven poster presentations.

The LuxLogAI conference dinner took place on a boat on the Moselle river during a cruise in the evening. Artist Egberdien van der Torre gave an art performance, and Yolanda Spinola-Elias (University of Seville) held a dinner speech entitled “An AI+A serendipity?”. She explained that Artificial Intelligence and Art confluences and conjunctions may not rely only on a serendipity process, but on a deeply intentional Art, Science, Technology and Society creative research system. Meta, multi and/or interdisciplinary creative processes were some of the issues that “AI and Art” covered during LuxLogAI 2018 in order to provide a wide perspective of AI impact in Art and vice versa.

LuxLogAI attracted a total of 224 registered participants. Of these 224 participants, approx. 100 attended RuleML+RR and GCAI.

The conference produced several award winners:

  • The LuxLogAI/GCAI best student paper award was given to Ruin Silva, Francisco S. Melo and Manuela Veloso, for their paper “What if the world were different? Gradient-based exploration for new optimal policies”.
  • The winners of the RuleML+RR best paper award were Stathis Delivorias, Michel Leclere, Marie-Laure Mugnier and Federico Ulliana, for their paper entitled “On the k-Boundedness for Existential Rules”.
  • The winners of the RuleML+RR Best rule challenge demo were Theodoros Mitsikas, Sofia Almpani, Petros Stefaneas, Panayiotis Frangos and Iakovos Ouranos  for their presentation entitled “Formalizing Air Traffic Control Regulations in PSOA RuleML”.
  • The winner of the RuleML+RR best poster award was Lukas Grätz, for his contribution entitled “Concepts as Modalities in Description Logics”.

A selection of the papers with the highest reviewing scores were invited to submit an extended version of their papers to the Special issue on “Logic Rules and Reasoning” of the Journal of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

A special thanks goes to all sponsors of RuleML+RR 2018 and LuxLogAI 2018: Binarypark; the Computer Science and Communications (CSC) Research Unit at the University of Luxembourg; the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Calabria; the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) and the Interdisciplinary Lab for Intelligent and Adaptive Systems (ILIAS) at the University of Luxembourg; LogicalContracts; the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR); oXygen; and Springer. A special thanks also goes to the publisher, Springer, for their cooperation in editing and publishing the conference proceedings, and to the CEUR voluntary organisation and EasyChair Publications for providing the facility to publish the proceedings of the conference sub-events.

The 3nd Int’l Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning is planned as part of the second edition of the Logic for AI Summit. It will take place in Bolzano in Italy in September 2019.