Italy

Researcher (scientific/technical/engineering)

Date of the expedition

From 01/12/2024 to 01/03/2025

Selected Track

Paired Teams

Project title

EXCEPTIONAL AI: REASONING WITH EXCEPTIONS

Host Organization

University of Toronto

Media

Biography

I am a PhD Student in Computer Science at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (UniBz) and Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) under the supervision of Loris Bozzato and Oliver Kutz. I did my master’s in philosophy at the University of Trento, where I studied logic and ontology. I am working on defeasible reasoning in description logics, investigating this topic’s philosophical and cognitive issues. I am particularly interested in researching central notions for understanding this kind of reasoning, like exceptionality, normality and typicality.

Project Summary

Defeasible reasoning is that kind of reasoning where exceptions to the knowledge involved in the reasoning are tolerated. For us as human beings, this is generally easy to do, but the same does not hold for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. How to model defeasible reasoning is a long-standing research topic in AI, however, the efforts concertante on how to make this realisable from a mostly technical point of view. But, given that dealing with exceptions is a peculiar human ability and that it would be crucial for an effective interaction between humans and artificial agents, I think it is important to address the problem from a broader perspective

Therefore, the goal of my project is to adopt a multidisciplinary approach towards modelling defeasible reasoning by focusing on the notion of exception as the core of the investigation.

Key Result

The expected results are:

  • An ontological analysis of the notion of exception, which plays a central role in understanding defeasible reasoning
  • The implementation of the formal system we developed to a real-world use case for which dealing with exceptions is a crucial ability
  • A draft of a research paper with the evaluation of the formal system with respect to the implementation.

Impact of the Fellowship

  • Strengthening research collaboration with the Semantic Technology Lab at the University of Toronto.
  • Building solid connections and partnerships in Europe and in Canada
  • Reinforced integration of social sciences and humanities in the project
  • Papers submission for publication
  • Conference attendance with paper