Partners Involved in EPCL

EPCL is offered by four European universities as full partners, and as associated partners three non-European research institutions and three industrial partners, two of them SMEs with strong international orientation, one of them a large globally operating company.

European Partner Universities

EPCL is jointly offered by four European partner universities:

• Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy (FUB),
• Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, coordinator (TUD),
• Technische Universität Wien, Austria (TUW),
• Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal (UNL).

TUD, UNL and TUW are traditional universities with a long-term history in research and education. They have been involved in numerous research projects and have graduated generations of PhD students. They are leading research universities in their country. On the other hand, FUB is a young university which has invested heavily into an excellent and international research and teaching staff.

All European partner universities are research universities and very active in the area of Computational Logic, in research as well as teaching. In 2004 they jointly founded the The European Master's Program in Computational Logic (EMCL) which is still successfully running, as demonstrated for example by the continuously increasing list of graduates in EMCL.

The key research and teaching staff at the partner universities is of the highest international quality. This can be documented by, for example, the number of national and international research and education projects carried out so far, the number and quality of refereed publications at international conferences and workshops and in international journals, the number and quality of the textbooks written by the staff members, the impact factors of the staff members calculated, for example, via citation indices, the number of international conferences and workshops organized so far, or the number of PhD students graduated in the past.

Based on a solid foundation within Computational Logic, their areas of specialization of the partners are different and complement each other. In particular, these areas are:

• FUB: Description Logics, Interoperability, Knowledge Representation and Data Bases, Logical Foundations of Data Integration, Ontologies, Rule Systems, and Semantic Web.
• TUD: Action Formalisms, Automata and Computation, Cognitive Science and Connectionism, Description Logics, Formal Concept Analysis, Model Checking, Natural Language Processing, Ontologies, SAT Solving, and Text Mining.
• TUW: Automated Deduction in Classical and Nonclassical Logic, Computational Complexity in Artificial Intelligence, Computational Proof Theory, Cut Elimination Methods, Data Extraction and Exchange, Discrete Reasoning Methods including Satisfiability Testing and extensions, Formal Systems Engineering and Verification, and Logic in Databases, Non-Monotonic Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, especially Answer Set Programming.
• UNL: Applications of Logic Programming, especially in Software Ver- ification, Constraint Systems, Implementations of PROLOG and Logic Programming Systems, Knowledge Representation with emphasis on Evolving Knowledge, Multi-Agent Systems, Probabilistic Methods, and Semantic Web.

Associated Partner Research Institutions

A stay at an associated institution, either a research institution or an industrial partner, is part of the mobility concept of EPCL. The associated partner research institutions of EPCL are:

• Simon Fraser University (SFU): The School of Computing Science at SFU is one of the largest in Western Canada. For three years running SFU has been rated Canada's best comprehensive university in Maclean's magazine's annual rankings of the country's top 48 universities. SFU participates in EPCL through its School of Computing Sciences. Its Computational Logic Lab comprises six faculty members along with graduate students, postdocs, and visitors. Areas of research include Constraint Satisfaction, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Combinatorics, Complexity, Computational Decision Theory, and Formal Verification.
• Universidad de Chile (UCH): The Department of Computer Science (DCC) at UCH in Santiago, Chile, is a leading Research Center in Computer Science. It has 20 full-time professors researching in areas such as Programming Languages, Databases, Theory of Computation, Logic, etc. It runs an international Ph.D. Program with more than 30 active students. In particular, it con- tributes to EPCL in the areas of Logical Theory of Databases and to the Logical Foundations of the Web.
• NICTA: NICTA is Australia's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Centre of Excellence. NICTA is funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council and the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, and the Governments of New South Wales (NSW), Victoria, Queensland, and the Australian Capitol Territory (ACT). NICTA's members and partner universities include the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the Australian National University (ANU), the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, Griffith University, the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland. With over 700 people, NICTA is the largest organization in Australia dedicated to ICT research and research training. NICTA's educational program builds on existing high-quality research training processes in its partner institutions, with an emphasis on adding value to degree programs in member, partner and other institutions. Most NICTA researchers hold an adjunct status with NICTA's partner universities and can act as supervisors in postgraduate programs. Doctoral candidates sent to NICTA will gain unique experience in carrying out their research in an environment that is strongly committed to delivering research outcomes in practice. NICTA researchers typically participate in a variety of applied projects and/or basic research activities. The candidates will benefit from that by the opportunity to strengthen their research from a practical angle that is grounded in fundamental research at the same time.

Associated Industrial Partners

The associated industrial partners of EPCL are:

• IBM Italia S.p.A.: IBM Italia (subsidiary of IBM Corp.) operates with more than 8.000 employees over 24 sites, with gross proceeds of about 2,3 Billion Euro. IBM Italia is responsible for IBM's research, development, services, and marketing activities in Italy. IBM is a global leader in the creation, development and manufacture of the industryâs most advanced information technologies. The IBM Center for Advanced Studies Rome is a national reference center for methodologies and technologies of services and data integration. It is particularly concerned with semantic technologies and ontology engineering, which are recognized as strategic topics for future developments of distributed systems, web service infrastructures, and the web. These themes will be developed in the collaboration with EPCL with a particular focus on the Public Connectivity System: the vision of a nation-wide web service e-government infrastructure that will allow systems to cooperate in a simpler way and citizens to benefit of better public services.
• Lixto Software GmbH: Lixto is particularly active in research topics like information extraction, visual wrappers, semi-structured data which complement the research topics of the European partner universities. At Lixto, doctoral candidates get into touch with information extraction from web data, a difficult problem in a highly practical setting, and have the possibility to learn about this exciting area and also get the possibility to deploy or experiment with logic-based methods and tools in this area. Lixto is an outgrow of strong theoretical research, and the logic-based methods and tools have been instrumental for the theory underlying information extraction languages like ELOG that have been developed in Lixto. The company is involved in several application-oriented PhD projects funded by the FFG, the Austrian research agency for more application-oriented research, and has experience in co-supervising doctoral candidates.