| BUDAPEST, HUNGARY |
| September 4-8, 2012 |
Abstract:
In the past 10 years New Zealand company Scientific Software and Systems has built, and continues to develop, a core business financial application using Prolog and CHR. The “SecuritEase” stock broking system is now in daily use at ten major brokerages throughout Australia and New Zealand including the 45 billion Euro National Australia Bank. Company Director and original software architect Mike Elston will show how the company has successfully used Prolog and CHR to break into a sector where, previously, traditional languages have dominated. In doing so he also aims to provide some encouragement and practical advice to those who believe that these technologies deserve wider acceptance.Abstract:
Starting by 1974, an enthusiastic group of medicinal chemists and programmers developed a series of Prolog-based modelling and program systems for decipher the relationship between chemical structures and biological activities, and thus construct more effective drugs and agrochemicals with less toxicity and side effects.
The over ten programs for predicting drug-drug interactions, toxicity, metabolic fate and physicochemical properties for drugs, pesticides, insecticides and other xenobiotics, have been used at more than 1000 sites worldwide and attracted investments from the US.
The lecture will summarise the pros and cons using Prolog for modelling and for programming in drug and agrochemical discovery, with some hints to recent application possibility in nanobiotechnology.
Abstract:
This year, SWI-Prolog turned 25. That is worth a celebration. More importantly, it is a good moment to look backward as well as forward. The landscape around programming and programming infrastructure including programming languages has changed dramatically in the past 25 years. This provides opportunities. The Web of Data -- or the Semantic Web -- provides a data and a knowledge representation framework in which logic plays an important role. Few IT solutions are monolithic these days. (Web-)service middleware, which is often rule-based, is an obvious place where logic programming can be (and is being) deployed. At the same time where, technically, being a small language becomes less of a problem, there are major bottlenecks, such as fragmented and low-traffic discussion forums, as well as low visibility on the Internet in the form of libraries and program fragments that can act as a starting point to solve one's problem. Finding an answer to these problems is, in my view, crucial.
Abstract:
At the turn of the new millennium, as soon as the idea of a Semantic Web took shape, raising quickly a worldwide consensus, an unavoidable invasion of agents into the Semantic Web, and of the Semantic Web into agents, started.Tangible expressions of this bidirectional invasion can be found, for example, in agent-based applications working on top or inside the Semantic Web, in proof and trust models initially born within the agent community but suitable for the Semantic Web as well, and in agent technologies integrating Semantic Web concepts as first-class entities.
Because of their declarative nature, amenable of formal reasoning, logical agents are extremely suitable to bridge the gap between the agent community and the Semantic Web one and to bring some discipline in this bi-directional invasion which, though a peaceful one, is bringing some chaos in both communities.
The aim of this tutorial is to discuss this invasion extent, its future trends, and to provide pointers for further reading.