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.