Abstract

"Database class overlapped with Faculty meeting, and Faculty meeting overlapped with AI club meeting." Could the Database class period have been after the AI club meeting? This type of qualitative reasoning with time intervals leads to a beautiful finite algebra that is NP-complete to reason over. However, if the language is restricted, the reasoning over some sub-algebras of this interval algebra are not so. They belong to P-class. To te extent I know, this is the only case where ALL possible tractable (P-class) sub-classes of an NP-complete problem have been identified. This hints to some unexplored relationship between an NP-complete problem and its tractable components and how to exploit that for computational advantage. I'll go over this dormant branch of AI, with bonus materials from some other Spatio-temporal calculi that spawned off from the works in this time-interval algebra, subject to the availability of time.

About the Speaker

Currently a Professor at the Florida Institute of Technology Debasis Mitra is a Physicst and a Computer Scientist. Professional objective of Debasis Mitra is to solve problems in science, engineering and medicine by using computer science and mathematics. The current theme of his research is to squeeze knowledge nuggets from noisy spatio-temporal data, especially in Bio-medical images. A long term vision is to understand the molecular biological processes for improving human health. In the past Mitra made contributions in artificial intelligence studying the qualitative reasoning problems with spatial and temporal constraints.