Tutorials are over. No more play time. The actual conference started today.
It kicked off with a keynote from Alison Gopnik. Author of "Scientist in the Crib", a book about how young children learn and experiment very effectively. Grown ups can't generally come up with novel ways of approaching a problem, whereas children will do all kinds of crazy things when trying to figure something out. Playfulness is important. Interestingly, kids as young as 3 years olds can probabilistic causal inference almost as well as grown-ups. Most people are only good for producing things and management when they get older. The young are the innovators.
An interesting talk on temporal reasoning added temporal markup to a corpus of newspaper articles. Their system used a first-order logic reasoner (OTTER) to allow users to make free-text temporal queries on the data set. E.g. "who were the prime-ministers of France from 1962 - 1998?"
When it came time for question I asked how much the temporal reasoning slowed down their query processing. Their answer: while a normal search takes 0.1 seconds to answer, turning on temporal inference increases the query time to 4 - 10 minutes (depending on the number of transitive chains that need to be evaluated). Uh-huh. Next. First-order logic reasoning is too slow.
Carsten Lutz gave a survey of description logic work. Many ontology reasoning systems are EXPTime in the worst case, but do quite well in the average case. This makes them quite usable in practice. However, more tools and systems integration is now required.
I found out what "hypergraph decomposition" is. A research from Vienna was presenting a poster on the subject. Hypergraphs are graphs where each arc/edge can connect more than two nodes together. They are good at capturing several NP-complete problems graphically. An algorithm to perfectly decompose hypergraphs is, of course, unsolvable in the worst case. A graph with as little as 100 nodes can require days of processing to solve. However, a quick-and-dirty algorithm called "bucket elimination" does very well.
This conference is turning out to be quite useful. My body actually functioned reasonably well today, too.