Presidential Young Investigator Awards

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This research project is concerned problems associated with reasoning about change. On the practical side, means of supporting changes in an Engineering Information System (EIS), that is a repository of information about an engineering artifact such as a VLSI circuit or software system will be investigated. It is now widely recognized that information management is crucial to the success of large scale design efforts. Near term projects in this area include construction of a main memory based data manager for high level synthesis of VLSI circuits; investigation of performance issues for updates in EIS, particularly as different aspects of the same design are updated in parallel by different engineers, leading to problems of data consistency and task coordination that are critical in large engineering projects. From a more theoretical perspective, there is interest in formal means of reasoning about changes in logical theories. For example, when a new piece of information about the world is discovered, how can one decide what old pieces of knowledge and data to keep, and what to discard in the light of the new information? This work is relevent to problems in databases (updating databases with incomplete information), philosophy (belief revision, revision of scientific theories), and artificial intelligence (planning, diagnosis, reasoning about the effects of actions, etc.). The studies of theory revision will emphasize problems from AI, such as reasoning about the location of objects in a room, as applications for revison techniques. Recent studies of the relationship of theory revision to circumscription and reasoning about action have proven particularly fruitful, and these will be pursued further.