Presidential Young Investigator Awards

这项研究项目是关于变化的推理的相关问题。在实践方面，将研究支持工程信息系统(EIS)中的变化的手段，即关于诸如VLSI电路或软件系统的工程人工制品的信息储存库。现在人们普遍认识到，信息管理对大规模设计工作的成功至关重要。这一领域的近期项目包括构建一个基于主存储器的数据管理器，用于VLSI电路的高级综合；研究EIS中更新的性能问题，特别是当不同的工程师并行更新同一设计的不同方面时，这会导致数据一致性和任务协调问题，这在大型工程项目中是至关重要的。从更多的理论角度来看，人们对关于逻辑理论变化的形式推理方法感兴趣。例如，当发现关于世界的一条新信息时，人们如何根据新信息决定保留哪些旧知识和数据，以及丢弃哪些旧知识和数据？这项工作涉及数据库(用不完全信息更新数据库)、哲学(信念修正、科学理论修正)和人工智能(规划、诊断、行动效果推理等)中的问题。理论修正的研究将侧重于人工智能中的问题，如关于物体在房间中的位置的推理，作为修正技术的应用。最近关于理论修正与行动的限制和推理的关系的研究已经被证明是特别有成效的，这些研究将进一步进行。

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.