Many publicly available databases exist for managing materials scientific data. These databases c... more Many publicly available databases exist for managing materials scientific data. These databases contain in- formation from a wide variety of work, and the infor- mation is typically encoded in some proprietary format aimed at highlighting the goals of their particular back- grounds and purposes. In order to accelerate the rate at which new materials are discovered, these databases must be federated to provide materials scientists with the means to efficiently access large quantities of highly relevant data. This position paper advocates the design of a content-based material science discovery network that can allow for more intelligent reasoning over the databases than current implementations can afford. We will discuss the gains of using a hierarchical ontology for describing metadata that captures the various layers of the materials science domain. We will then discuss our approach in a content-based networking context.
The study of actual causation concerns reasoning about events that have been instrumental in brin... more The study of actual causation concerns reasoning about events that have been instrumental in bringing about a particular outcome. Although the subject has long been studied in a number of fields including artificial intelligence, existing approaches have not yet reached the point where their results can be directly applied to explain causation in certain advanced scenarios, such as pin-pointing causes and responsibilities for the behavior of a complex cyber-physical system. We believe that this is due, at least in part, to a lack of distinction between the laws that govern individual states of the world and events whose occurrence cause state to evolve. In this paper, we present a novel approach to reasoning about actual causation that leverages techniques from Reasoning about Actions and Change to identify detailed causal explanations for how an outcome of interest came to be. We also present an implementation of the approach that leverages Answer Set Programming.
We introduce the early stages of an investigation into a novel method for interpreting natural la... more We introduce the early stages of an investigation into a novel method for interpreting natural language sources that describe sequences of actions. Beyond representing the actions themselves, the approach leverages natural language processing techniques and constraint-based reasoning to represent and reason about the state of the world before, during, and after them. We believe that deep reasoning can be carried out over the representation by Information Retrieval and Question Answering systems.
In this paper we present our methodology for constructing the Tactical Heterogenous Ontology Repr... more In this paper we present our methodology for constructing the Tactical Heterogenous Ontology Representation (THOR), a doctrine-based military ontology that models numerous aspects of the military domain as described by field manuals, joint publications, and scenarios informed by subject matter experts. Developed for DARPA’s Content-Based Mobile Edge Network (CBMEN) program, the ontology provides the conceptual vocabulary needed to describe and request the warfighter-generated content. CBMEN leverages smart device technologies alongside concepts from contentbased networking and knowledge representation in order to enable intelligent reasoning over dynamic mission data and the efficient transmission of critical mission content at the tactical edge.
In Causality,actual causecan be defined as an event determined to be responsible for bringing abo... more In Causality,actual causecan be defined as an event determined to be responsible for bringing about a given outcome in a specific scenario. For example, Socrates drinking hemlock can be viewed as the actual cause of the philosopher’s death. However, it is also reasonable to consider why he consumed it in the first place — if he was forced to drink the hemlock as punishment for a crime, then is his acting against the law another cause of his death? Clearly, an outcome can be associated with multiple actual causes and choosing the most suitable among them often requires considering the context of the inquiry. In this paper, we introduce the concept of cause with context (CwC), a variation on the notion of actual cause that considers contextual information about a cause’s relationship to the domain in which it has occurred. We present a novel framework for representing CwCs, inspired by Counterfactual Reasoning and making use of techniques from Reasoning about Actions and Change to sup...
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Papers by Emily LeBlanc