Declarative AI 2026

About: Thomas Bolander, PhD, is a professor of logic and artificial intelligence (AI) at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark. His main research focus is on the modelling of social phenomena and social intelligence with the aim of creating explainable AI systems that can interact robustly and intelligently with other agents (humans and AI systems). He is one of the main researchers within the area of Epistemic Planning providing AI agents, e.g. robots, with the ability to take the perspective of other agents into account when planning. He is also one of the central public communicators of AI in Denmark. In 2019 he received the H.C. Ørsted award for excellence in science communication, and in 2024 he received the DAIR Lifetime Achievement in AI award. 

Abstract: Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) can be used as a formalism for agents to represent the mental states of other agents: their beliefs and knowledge, and potentially even their plans and goals. Hence, the logic can be used as a formalism to give agents a Theory of Mind allowing them to take the perspective of other agents. In my research, I have combined DEL with techniques from automated planning in order to describe a theory of what I call Epistemic Planning: planning where agents explicitly reason about the mental states of others. One of the recurring themes is implicit coordination: how to successfully achieve joint goals in decentralised multi-agent systems without prior negotiation or coordination. The talk will first motivate the importance of Theory of Mind reasoning to achieve efficient agent interaction and coordination, will then give a brief introduction to epistemic planning based on DEL, address its (computational) complexity, address issues of implicit coordination and, finally, demonstrate applications of epistemic planning in human-robot collaboration.

About: TBA

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About: Matti Järvisalo is Professor of Computer Science (Algorithms and Machine Learning) at University of Helsinki, Finland, where he leads the Constraint Reasoning and Optimization group. His research interests span several areas in artificial intelligence, including automated reasoning and declarative programming, combinatorial optimization, knowledge representation and graphical models, with key contributions especially in theory and practice of Boolean satisfiability (SAT), SAT-based decision, combinatorial optimization and counting procedures, and their applications. His group has been successful in developing state-of-the-art solvers and tools e.g. for SAT, maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT), pseudo-Boolean optimization, formal argumentation, and answer set programming. With over 160 peer-reviewed publications to date, Dr. Järvisalo has received various best paper awards and other international recognitions for his contributions, including the IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Award and an IJCAI Early Career Spotlight, as well as further best paper recognitions at ECAI, CP, KR, ICLP and PGM. In addition to organizing various workshops and conferences, he was PC Chair for SAT'13, IJCAI-PRICAI'20 Demo Track, KR'23 Applications and Systems Track, and KR'24 In the Wild Track, Chair of the Finnish AI Society (EurAI member society of Finland) 2019-2021, and has served on program committees of over 100 conferences. Today he serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Automated Reasoning, and Journal of Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation. Dr. Järvisalo has also been involved in organizing various automated reasoning competitions, including the renown SAT solver competitions and MaxSAT Evaluations for many years.

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