Abduction in Logic Programming started in the late 80s, early 90s, in an attempt to extend logic programming into a framework suitable for a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence and other areas of Computer Science. This paper aims to chart out the main developments of the field over the last ten years and to take a critical view of these developments from several perspectives: logical, epistemological, computational and suitability to application. The paper attempts to expose some of the challenges and prospects for the further development of the field.

We present a new abductive, probabilistic theory of plan recognition. This model differs from previous theories in being centered around a model of plan execution: most previous methods have been based on plans as formal objects or on rules describing the recognition process. We show that our new model accounts for phenomena omitted from most previous plan recognition theories: notably the cumulative effect of a sequence of observations of partially-ordered, interleaved plans and the effect of context on plan adoption. The model also supports inferences about the evolution of plan execution in situations where another agent intervenes in plan execution. This facility provides support for using plan recognition to build systems that will intelligently assist a user. 1

Learning patterns of human behavior from sensor data is extremely important for high-level activity inference. We show how to extract and label a person’s activities and significant places from traces of GPS data. In contrast to existing techniques, our approach simultaneously detects and classifies the significant locations of a person and takes the high-level context into account. Our system uses relational Markov networks to represent the hierarchical activity model that encodes the complex relations among GPS readings, activities and significant places. We apply FFT-based message passing to perform efficient summation over large numbers of nodes in the networks. We present experiments that show significant improvements over existing techniques. 1

The independent choice logic (ICL) is part of a project to combine logic and decision/game theory into a coherent framework. The ICL has a simple possible-worlds semantics characterised by independent choices and an acyclic logic program that specifies the consequences of these choices. This paper gives an abductive characterization of the ICL. The ICL is defined model-theoretically, but we show that it is naturally abductive: the set of explanations of a proposition g is a concise description of the worlds in which g is true. We give an algorithm for computing explanations and show it is sound and complete with respect to the possible-worlds semantics. What is unique about this approach is that the explanations of the negation of g can be derived from the explanations of g. The use of probabilities over choices in this framework and going beyond acyclic logic programs are also discussed.

This paper presents the theoretical foundations of a vision system in which the effects of highlevel reasoning percolate all the way down to influence the low-level processing of raw sensor data. This is achieved through the mechanisms of feedback and expectation. The main contribution of the paper is to present a formal framework, based on the abductive interpretation of sensor data, that incorporates the ideas of feedback and expectation in a way that marries them to logical reasoning. To enable this, two alternative measures of explanatory value are defined.

This paper presents a search algorithm for estimating posterior probabilities in discrete Bayesian networks. It shows how conflicts (as used in consistency-based diagnosis) can be adapted to speed up the search. This algorithm is especially suited to the case where there are skewed distributions, although nothing about the algorithm or the definitions depends on skewness of distributions. The general idea is to forward simulate the network, based on the `normal' values for each variable (the value with high probability given its parents). When a predicted value is at odds with the observations, we analyse which variables were responsible for the expectation failure --- these form a conflict --- and continue forward simulation considering different values for these variables. This results in a set of possible worlds from which posterior probabilities --- together with error bounds --- can be 1 derived. Empirical results with Bayesian networks having tens of thousands of nodes are presented.

To be effective, current intrusion detection systems (IDSs) must incorporate artificial intelligence methods for plan recognition. Plan recognition is critical both to predicting the future actions of attackers and planning appropriate responses to their actions. However network security places a new set of requirements on plan recognition. In this paper we present an argument for including plan recognition in IDSs and an algorithm for conducting plan recognition that meets the needs of the network security domain. 1.

This paper introduces the independent choice logic, and in particular the "single agent with nature " instance of the independent choice logic, namely ICL DT . This is a logical framework for decision making uncertainty that extends both logic programming and stochastic models such as influence diagrams. This paper shows how the representation of a decision problem within the independent choice logic can be exploited to cut down the combinatorics of dynamic programming. One of the main problems with influence diagram evaluation techniques is the need to optimise a decision for all values of the `parents' of a decision variable. In this paper we show how the rule based nature of the ICL DT can be exploited so that we only make distinctions in the values of the information available for a decision that will make a difference to utility. 1

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Abstract. The Independent Choice Logic began in the early 90’s as a way to combine logic programming and probability into a coherent framework. The idea of the Independent Choice Logic is straightforward: there is a set of independent choices with a probability distribution over each choice, and a logic program that gives the consequences of the choices. There is a measure over possible worlds that is defined by the probabilities of the independent choices, and what is true in each possible world is given by choices made in that world and the logic program. ICL is interesting because it is a simple, natural and expressive representation of rich probabilistic models. This paper gives an overview of the work done over the last decade and half, and points towards the considerable work ahead, particularly in the areas of lifted inference and the problems of existence and identity. 1