18 June 2018: Mateja Jamnik

Title: Capturing Intuition - the Case of Diagrammatic Representations and Reasoning

Abstract:  In this talk we examine the role that diagrams play in human reasoning from the computational, algorithmic and implementational point of view. We argue that diagrams can provide part of human reasoning that carries the intuition of the solution to a problem. Our interest does not lie in machine-oriented reasoning, which symbolic logic is typically used for. Instead, we study diagrammatic systems as one plausible way to model human-oriented approaches to reasoning. We examine this from two perspectives. First, how can human ability to choose an appropriate representation of a problem be computationally modelled? Second, we present a case study of how diagrammatic representations can be used for reasoning in practical domains, such as ontologies.

With the insights from these studies, our goal is to build systems that work in with us in more human-like ways.