Special issue on practical aspects of automated reasoning

Automated reasoning is one of the most exciting fields of research in computer science. It provides the ability to apply the speed, precision and endurance of computers to tedious tasks that currently require exquisitely trained and highly skilled human experts. Successful automated reasoning systems can ensure a much higher level of trust in complex mathematical proofs, they can enable us to automatically eliminate large classes of errors from software systems and communication protocols, and they can be used to support the creation and reasoning in large knowledge bases and theories. After a long time of significant, but mostly theoretical progress, the last decade has experienced a marked increase in useful implementations and applications of reasoning systems. We are seeing some of the fruits of this practical and application oriented research now. After a number of successes by various groups in mathematical reasoning [3], hardware verification [1,4,5], and software synthesis [6], NICTA in Canberra has just announced the first fully verified operation system kernel [2]. In order to further help the transition from theory to practice we organized a number of workshops dealing with practical aspects of automated reasoning:

[1]  E. Allen Emerson,et al.  Efficient Temporal Satisfiability , 1992, J. Log. Comput..

[2]  Edmund M. Clarke,et al.  Design and Synthesis of Synchronization Skeletons Using Branching-Time Temporal Logic , 1981, Logic of Programs.

[3]  Michael Norrish,et al.  seL4: formal verification of an OS kernel , 2009, SOSP '09.

[4]  Rajeev Goré,et al.  One-Pass Tableaux for Computation Tree Logic , 2007, LPAR.

[5]  Björn Pelzer,et al.  System Description: E-KRHyper , 2007, CADE.

[6]  Alexander Bolotov.  Clausal resolution for branching-time temporal logic , 2000 .

[7]  Dragomir R. Radev,et al.  Question-answering by predictive annotation , 2000, SIGIR '00.

[8]  William McCune,et al.  Experiments with discrimination-tree indexing and path indexing for term retrieval , 1992, Journal of Automated Reasoning.

[9]  Andrei Voronkov,et al.  The design and implementation of VAMPIRE , 2002, AI Commun..

[10]  Clare Dixon,et al.  Clausal temporal resolution , 1999, TOCL.

[11]  Christoph Weidenbach,et al.  Labelled Clauses , 2007, CADE.

[12]  Clare Dixon,et al.  Clausal resolution for normal modal logics , 2007, J. Algorithms.

[13]  Paulo Quaresma,et al.  The Senso Question Answering Approach to Portuguese QA@CLEF-2007 , 2007, CLEF.

[14]  Bogdan Sacaleanu,et al.  DFKI at QA@CLEF 2008. , 2008 .

[15]  Hinrich Schütze,et al.  Introduction to information retrieval , 2008 .

[16]  E. Allen Emerson,et al.  Temporal and Modal Logic , 1991, Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Volume B: Formal Models and Sematics.

[17]  Joseph Y. Halpern,et al.  Decision procedures and expressiveness in the temporal logic of branching time , 1982, STOC '82.

[18]  Valentin Goranko,et al.  Logic in Computer Science: Modelling and Reasoning About Systems , 2007, J. Log. Lang. Inf..

[19]  Clare Dixon,et al.  Temporal resolution using a breadth-first search algorithm , 1998, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

[20]  Richard Waldinger,et al.  A Guide to Snark , 2000 .

[21]  José Luis Vicedo González,et al.  Re-ranking Passages with LSA in a Question Answering System , 2006, CLEF.

[22]  John Harrison,et al.  A Machine-Checked Theory of Floating Point Arithmetic , 1999, TPHOLs.

[23]  William McCune,et al.  Solution of the Robbins Problem , 1997, Journal of Automated Reasoning.

[24]  Boris Konev,et al.  TRP++2.0: A Temporal Resolution Prover , 2003, CADE.

[25]  Zohar Manna,et al.  The Temporal Logic of Reactive and Concurrent Systems , 1991, Springer New York.

[26]  Thomas A. Henzinger,et al.  Alternating-time temporal logic , 1999 .

[27]  Stephan Merz,et al.  Model Checking , 2000 .

[28]  Rajeev Goré,et al.  System Description : The Tableaux Work Bench , 2003 .

[29]  Geoff Sutcliffe,et al.  The state of CASC , 2006, AI Commun..

[30]  Geoff Sutcliffe,et al.  The TPTP Problem Library , 1994, Journal of Automated Reasoning.

[31]  Christoph Weidenbach,et al.  Combining Superposition, Sorts and Splitting , 2001, Handbook of Automated Reasoning.

[32]  Richard J. Waldinger,et al.  Answering Science Questions: Deduction with Answer Extraction and Procedural Attachment , 2008, AAAI Spring Symposium: Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration.

[33]  J. Strother Moore,et al.  A Mechanically Checked Proof of the AMD5K86TM Floating Point Division Program , 1998, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[34]  William McCune,et al.  OTTER 3.3 Reference Manual , 2003, ArXiv.

[35]  Harald Ganzinger,et al.  Resolution Theorem Proving , 2001, Handbook of Automated Reasoning.

[36]  Dan I. Moldovan,et al.  A Temporally-Enhanced PowerAnswer in TREC 2006 , 2006, TREC.

[37]  Rob Potharst,et al.  Monotone Decision Trees , 1997 .

[38]  Clare Dixon,et al.  Clausal resolution in a logic of rational agency , 2002, Artif. Intell..

[39]  Douglas B. Lenat,et al.  CYC: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure , 1995, CACM.

[40]  Geoff Sutcliffe,et al.  The development of CASC , 2002, AI Commun..

[41]  Johannes Leveling.  IRSAW – Towards Semantic Annotation of Documents for Question Answering , 2007 .

[42]  Pedro M. Domingos,et al.  Tree Induction for Probability-Based Ranking , 2003, Machine Learning.

[43]  Michael Fisher,et al.  A clausal resolution method for CTL branching-time temporal logic , 1999, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[44]  Robert Veroff,et al.  Solving Open Questions and Other Challenge Problems Using Proof Sketches , 2001, Journal of Automated Reasoning.

[45]  Johann Schumann,et al.  Synthesizing Certified Code , 2002, FME.

[46]  Clare Dixon,et al.  Resolution for branching time temporal logics: applying the temporal resolution rule , 2000, Proceedings Seventh International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning. TIME 2000.

[47]  Alexander Bolotov,et al.  Towards gcm re-configuration - extending specification by norms , 2007, CoreGRID Workshop - Making Grids Work.

[48]  Stephan Schulz,et al.  E - a brainiac theorem prover , 2002, AI Commun..

[49]  U. Hustadt,et al.  TRP + + : A temporal resolution prover ⋆ , 2002 .

[50]  Ingo Glöckner,et al.  Combining Theorem Proving with Natural Language Processing , 2008, PAAR/ESHOL.

[51]  David M. Russinoff.  A Mechanically Checked Proof of IEEE Compliance of the Floating Point Multiplication, Division and Square Root Algorithms of the AMD-K7™ Processor , 1998, LMS J. Comput. Math..

[52]  Vaughan R. Pratt,et al.  A Near-Optimal Method for Reasoning about Action , 1980, J. Comput. Syst. Sci..

[53]  Tanel Tammet.  Gandalf , 2004, Journal of Automated Reasoning.

[54]  Sanda M. Harabagiu,et al.  COGEX: A Logic Prover for Question Answering , 2003, NAACL.

[55]  Adam Pease,et al.  Towards a standard upper ontology , 2001, FOIS.