Professor für Angewandte Informatik, insbesondere Smart Environments 

Research

My research can be characterized by two sub-areas of Artificial Intelligence, namely knowledge representation and cognitive agents. I investigate representations that allow cognitive agents, assistance systems, robots, or software agents situated in the real world to represent their environment and to reason about it. Dealing with coarse, uncertain, and even conflicting knowledge is of key interest to me. I take a broad interpretation of the term reasoning to encompass all rational tasks required by a cognitive agent, in particular planning and recognition of context, actions, and events as well as learning and deduction. I am developing the spatial reasoning toolbox SparQ and I am likewise interested in beautiful theories and efficient algorithms. So far, I have contributed to these research areas:

• Qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning
• Knowledge representation, symbolic reasoning
• Hybrid AI, in particular grounding symbolic reasoning in machine learning
• AI robotics, mobile robot localization, mapping, and navigation
• Semantics of natural language, referring expression generation
• Shape retrieval in computer vision

Recent Research Activities 

• QR 2021 program co-chair, together with Ken Forbus (Northwestern)
• KI 2020 program co-chair, together with Ute Schmid (Bamberg), Franziska Klügl (Örebro)
• QR 2019 progam co-chair, together with Matt Klenk (Xerox Parc)
• Frequent reviewer for Artificial Intelligence, Spatial Cognition and Computation, and other journals
• Tutorial on qualitative spatial reasoning at COSIT 2017 and COSIT 2013
• Co-Organizer of Learning & Reasoning workshop at IJCAI 2018
• Co-Organizer for KI 2015 Workshop Qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning: computational complexity and algorithms
• Co-Organizer for AAAI 2014 spring symposium Qualitative Representations for Robots
• regularly PC member for IJCAI (since 2014), AAAI (since 2017), KR (since 2014), COSIT (since 2013)
• PC member for various conferences, including Spatial Cognition, QR, and IRSC

Teaching

Please consult UniVIS as well as these web pages for courses related to smart environments and have a look at the suggested topics for theses (webpages in German).

Publications

Please consult my partially complete list of publications. If you find interest in a paper you cannot access, please don't hesitate contacting me! There is also a public Google scholar bibliography of mine as well as bibliography on ResearchGate, neither of which receiving much care. 

Selected publications

• Özgür Lütfü Özçep, Mena Leemhuis, Diedrich Wolter (2020). Cone Semantics for Logics with Negation, Proc. of IJCAI 2020, 1820-1826. doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/252
• Frank Dylla, Jae Hee Lee, Till Mossakowski, Thomas Schneider, André van Delden, Jasper van de Ven, and Diedrich Wolter (2017). A Survey of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Calculi - Algebraic and Computational Properties. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 50:1, Article No. 7, 53 pages
• Vivien Mast, Zoe Falomir, and Diedrich Wolter (2016). Probabilistic reference and grounding with PRAGR for dialogues with robots, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 28:5, special issue on cognitive robotics, pp 889–911 (publisher link)
• Diedrich Wolter and Jan Oliver Wallgrün (2012). Qualitative spatial reasoning for applications: new challenges and the SparQ toolbox (authors' pre-final version), in Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Representation and Reasoning: Trends and Future Directions, Shyamanta M. Hazarika (Editor), IGI Global, Hershey (PA), USA
• Diedrich Wolter and Jae Hee Lee (2010). Qualitative reasoning with directional relations, Artificial Intelligence, 174:18, pp. 1498–1507
  
• Diedrich Wolter (2008). Spatial representation and reasoning for robot mapping—a shape-based approach, Vol. 48 of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, ISBN 978-3-540-69011-5, Springer
• Reinhard Moratz, Jochen Renz, and Diedrich Wolter (2000). Qualitative spatial reasoning about line segments, ECAI 2000—Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, W. Horn (editors), pp. 234–238, Berlin