After early exposure to research working on expert
systems based on temporal logic, rules and frames as a software engineer
trainee at IBM and Dassault research centers in
France, my research career per-se started at Columbia University, New York where I tackled three key issues in Natural Language Generation (NLG):
(1) the generation of coordinated text and graphics in
multimedia tutorials and data summaries,
(2) the generation of concise and semantically dense news
summaries, by opportunistically fitting background information as short
modifying phrases in carefully chosen locations inside a draft focusing only on
the key new facts to report, and
(3) a methodology for knowledge acquisition and
quantitative output evaluation of NLG systems based on model text corpus
analysis. This work resulted in 12 publications including in one in Artificial Intelligence and one in Computational Linguistics,
in addition to my PhD. thesis (cited in 55 publications indexed on Google Scholar).
Once a post-doctoral researcher and then professor at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) in
Over the same period, I also worked on parallel tracks
addressing the following issues:
(1) Improving web search by automatically expanding
queries with keyword synonyms from a thesaurus,
(2) Engineering methodology and CASE tools for agent teams
(e.g., in robotic soccer simulations) that leveraged the complementary
strengths of object-oriented modeling and logic programming (using UML, OCL and the Flora-2
inference engine based
on Transaction Frame Logic [16] [17] [18] [19]
[20]), and
(3) Inductive Object-Oriented Logic Programming to learn
Flora-2 programs from training data.
Work on theses tracks resulted in 3 Master's Theses and 4 publications,
including a Best Paper Award.
Albeit diverse, all the above decision support
systems, web search and multi-agent simulations projects shared two aspects.
First, they all attempted to engineer highly innovative, practical IT services
by aggregating some form of cutting-edge Automated Reasoning (AR) to
technologies from other fields (databases, distributed systems, software
engineering). Second, their technology transfer from brittle proof of concepts
prototypes to profitable industrial applications all hit one common stumbling
block: the AR tools they relied upon were prohibitively hard to learn, use,
interoperate, customize, and extend, mainly due to their monolithic software
architecture, unfriendly interfaces and non-mainstream execution platforms.
Over the last four years, I thus refocused my research
on removing this stumbling block, by elaborating the long-term project ORC2AS
(Objects, Rules, Constraints and Components for Agents and Simulations).
It studies the low-cost engineering of easy to learn, use, debug, customize,
extend and assemble Java or .Net components that encapsulate the most versatile
yet scalable AR techniques. It covers the methodological (artifacts, process)
technological (languages, components) and theoretical (formal semantics) axes
of such study. Its key idea it to integrate in bi-directional synergy:
a.
Component-Based, Aspect-Oriented MDE leveraging OMG standards and
b.
Object-Oriented
Rule-Based
Constraint Programming.
Due to the ambitious scope and trans-disciplinary
nature of this project, I first focused my efforts on creating an international
network of collaborations to carry it out. This network currently aggregates a
25 strong team (9 senior researchers, 8 PhD. students and 8 MSc.
students) in 7 institutions: UFPE, Universidade de Pernambuco, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Universität
Mannheim, Universität Ulm, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft,
and INRIA. Parts of this project have been funded by CAPES, FACEPE, COFECUB,
DAAD and INRIA.
It has so far resulted in 8 publications.
PhD. Theses (sole supervisor)
1.
Franklin Ramalho. MODELOG: Model-Oriented Development with
Executable Logic Object Generation. Centro de Informática,
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
(CIn-UFPE),
2.
Hendrik Macedo. A Software
Architecture for Ubiquitous Web Browsing with Application to Recommendation
Systems. CIn-UFPE,
3.
Eloi Favero. Generating
Hypertext Summaries of Quantitative Data in Multi-Dimensional Databases.
CIn-UFPE,
PhD. Thesis (co-supervisor)
1.
Rosely Lacerda. Gramática do Sintagma Nominal Português em um Formalismo Computacional. (A
Computational Grammar of the Portuguese Noun Phrase), Departamento de Literatura e Linguística, Universidade Federal de Alagoas,
Master's Theses (sole supervisor):
1.
Klebson Silva. Ambiente
de Análise e Depuração de Sistemas Multi-Agente: Aplicação ao Desenvolvimento
de Time de Futebol de Robô
(Analysing and degugging
multi-agent systems based on object-oriented logic with application to RoboCup), CIn-UFPE,
2.
3.
Alexandre Damasceno. Desenvolver Agentes de Futebol com Objetos e Lógica (Developing soccer agents with objects and logic).
CIn-UFPE,
4.
Fabio Pereira.
Um Componente de Mineração
de Exceções em Cubos OLAP (A component for outlier mining in OLAP
databases). CIn-UFPE,
5.
Marcelino Pereira. SKDQL: Uma Linguagem Declarativa de Especificação de Tarefas e Consultas de Descoberta de Conhecimento em Banco de Dados e sua Implementação (SKDQL, a declarative language for specifying
knowledge discovery queries and tasks and its implementation). CIn-UFPE,
6.
Franklin Ramalho.
Avaliando o Uso
de um Tesaurus no Processo
de Expansão Automática de Consultas para Engenhos de Busca na Web (Evaluation of thesaurus-based query expansion for
web search engines). CIn-UFPE,
7.
Natasha Queiroz.
DOODI: uma API para integracao de bancos de dados multidimensionais e sistemas dedutivos (DOODI: An API to connect OLAP and
object-oriented deductive databases). CIn-UFPE,
8.
Robson Fidalgo. JODI: uma API Java para OLAP (JODI: a Java API to access OLAP databases). CIn-UFPE,
Bachelor's
Degree Graduation Projects (sole supervisor):
1.
Marcos Aurelio da Silva. CHORD: Constraint Handling Object-oriented
Rules with Disjunctive bodies. CIn-UFPE,
2.
Luiz Lacerda. Interface Visual
de Depuração de Time de Futebol
de Robô (A GUI for Simulated Robotic Soccer Team
Debugging). CIn-UFPE,
3.
André Novaes. Estudo de Viabilidade de uma Implementação Oracle9i de um SGBD Dedutivo
Orientado a Objeto no Formalismo F-Logic (Feasibility of implementing a Frame
Logic deductive object-oriented databases in Oracle9i). CIn-UFPE,
From 1990 to 1996, I co-developed with Michael Elhadad the open-source, reusable SURGE (Systemic
Unification Realization Grammar of English) syntactic realization component for
Natural Language Generation (NLG). Written in the high-level, declarative,
sorted feature logic language FUF (Functional Unification Facility), SURGE
encapsulates a wide coverage of the English grammar that computationally
formalizes and integrates the linguistic theories and grammars of Halliday, Quirk at al. and others. It consists of over 7500
lines of FUF code. After the release of version 2.0, it quickly became to most
widely adopted syntactic realization tool in the worldwide NLG research
community, being cited in about half of all NLG publications over the period
1995-2001. It is now cited in 233 research publications and 10,300 web pages.
It was also successfully reused in several industrial systems (cf.
technology transfer section). The availability of FUF compilers to Lisp, C and
Java make SURGE efficient and available on many platforms.
As a research consultant at Bellcore,
New Jersey, in 1993-1995, I participated to the successful transfer of the NLG
technology to automate production of required business documentation: (a)
textual summaries of telecommunication equipment installation plans that
justify pricing decisions to regulatory agencies or judges during consumer
lawsuits, and (b) textual summaries justifying business reengineering plans to
management of consultancy client firms. In the first project, the PLANDoc NLG component was integrated to an expert system
generating a base plan and an alternative scenario simulator allowing an
engineer to test base plan variations. It automatically generated the textual
summary from traces of these two other components. In the second project, the FLOWDoc NLG component was integrated to a workflow modeling
tool to acquire the client's current business process and an optimization tool
suite to discover better business processes. It automatically generated the
textual summary from the workflows of the current and proposed reengineered
business processes. These two systems were put in profitable day to day use at Bellcore. PLANDoc generated
documents that were used in court as evidence in a million dollar range lawsuit
won by Bellcore. FLOWDoc
generated documents that convinced several Bellcore
clients to adopt the proposed reengineering of their business process.
In 2003, I was hired by CESAR -- a financially
self-sustained IT consulting and start-up farm NGO and the largest organization
in downtown Recife's IT organization cluster (Porto Digital) -- to head
a consulting team which mission was to define the strategic mission, legal
status, organizational structure, funding strategies and initial projects of I3
(Instituto de Inovação em Informática), a CESAR
spin-off dedicated to connect local universities, companies, government
agencies and NGO to carry out economically promising IT innovation projects. I3
is now playing a key role in Porto Digital to foster technology transfer
and create profitable synergies in the regional IT ecosystem.
[1] http://www.siggen.org/
[2]
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/robin96empirically.html
[3]
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=972696&dl=GUIDE
[4]
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/robin94revisionbased.html
[5]
http://www.dwreview.com/OLAP/Introduction_OLAP.html
[6] http://www.planetmde.org/
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommendation_system
[8] http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml20/
[9] http://www.robocup.org/
[10]
http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/ocl.htm
[11] http://flora.sourceforge.net/
[12]
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.ir2001.oulu.fi/images/gallery/large/701.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.ir2001.oulu.fi/gallery/7/701/&h=473&w=712&sz=74&hl=en&start=2&tbnid=pP2n2kLMQqoAQM:&tbnh=93&tbnw=140&prev=/images?q=jacques+robin+IR
[13] http://www.aosd.net/
[14] http://www.omg.org/
[15] http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dtai/projects/CHR/
[16] Bonner, A. and Kifer, M.
Transaction Logic programming (or, a
logic of procedural and declarative knowledge). Technical
Report. CSRI-323, Computer Systems Research Institute,
[17] Bonner, A. and Kifer, M.
Concurrency
and Communication in Transaction Logic. Proceedings of the Joint International Conference
and Symposium on Logic Programming.
[18] Kifer, M. Deductive and
Object Data Languages: A Quest for Integration. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1013. Springer. 1995.
[19] Kifer, M., Lausen, G. and Wu, J . Logical Foundations of
Object-Oriented and Frame-Based Languages. Journal
of the ACM 42. 1995.
[20] Yang, G. A Model Theory for Nonmonotonic Multiple
Value and Code Inheritance in Object-Oriented Knowledge Bases. PhD. Thesis, Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University of
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