Full Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science Dept. of the University of L'Aquila, Italy
URL: Home page

Title: Self-checking Logical Agents

Abstract: We present a comprehensive framework for run-time selfchecking of logical agents, by means of temporal axioms to be dynamically checked. These axioms are specified by using an agent-oriented interval temporal logic defined to this purpose. We define syntax, semantics and pragmatics for this new logic, specifically tailored for application to agents. In the resulting framework, we encompass and extend our past work.

Short CV:
From November 2005, Full Professor of Computer Science at the Computer Science Dept. of the University of L'Aquila.
From March 2001 to October 2005, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Computer Science Dept. of the University of L'Aquila.
From 1990 to 1999, Assistant Professor in Computer Science first at the University of Milano, then (1999) at the University of L'Aquila.

Research interests: Computational Logic, Logic Programming and Artificial intelligence.

Projects:
Stefania Costantini participated in several national and international projects, and has been the Coordinator of the node of L'Aquila in the European Projects WASP (Working Group on Answer Set Programming) and CUSPIS (a Cultural Heritage Space Identification System).

Main Achievements (with several co-authors):
Metalogic Programming:
Stefania Costantini studied how to extend logic programming languages with metalogic constructs, i.e., naming mechanisms for reifying language expressions, metalevel rules, and logical reflection for shifting from the object to the metalevel and vice versa. She has defined Reflective Prolog.
Logic Programming with Negation, and Non-Monotonic Reasoning:
Stefania Costantini contributed to the theory and practice of Answer Set Programming (ASP), which is a recent logic programming paradigm, able to cope with uncertainty by producing all consistent alternative answers. She has been studying syntactic conditions for the existence of stable models, and how to usefully represent programs as graphs, either oriented to rules (Extended Dependency Graph, EDG), or to components (Cycle Graph). In recent work, Stefania Costantini has introduced in ASP the possibility of reasoning about resources and (even complex) preferences (RASP). She is working about translation into ASP of knowledge extracted from natural language.
Logical Agents:
Stefania Costantini proposed a new logic programming language, called DALI, with active and reactive rules, close in syntax and semantics to the traditional Horn Clause language. The evolutionary semantics of DALI is fully logical, even though the language provides the treatment of several kind of events, both external and internal. DALI has been fully implemented ahd experimented in concrete applications. She also work about agents for user monitoring and training, self-checking agents, multi-layer agent models, self-organizing agent architectures.