Kowalski, Robert

Robert Kowalski
Robert Kowalski
Robert Kowalski

Robert Kowalski is Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London. He studied at the University of Chicago, the University of Bridgeport, Stanford University, the Univer-sity  of  Warsaw,  and  the  University  of  Edinburgh,  where  he  completed  his  PhD  in 1970. He joined Imperial College in 1975.

Kowalski’s early research was in the field of automated theorem-proving, leading to the development of logic programming in the early 1970s. His later research has focused on the use of logic programming for knowledge representation and problem solving, including work on the event calculus, legal reasoning, abductive reasoning and argumentation.

He is currently working with Fariba Sadri on developing the logic and computer language LPS, and with Miguel Calejo on the logical representation and execution of legal  contracts. The philosophical background for this work is presented in his 2011 book Computational Logic and Human Thinking – How to be Artificially Intelligent. An open-source, online prototype of LPS, with examples of executable logical contracts is accessible from http://lps.doc.ic.ac.uk/.

During the 1980s, Kowalski was heavily involved in the British response to the Japanese Fifth Generation Project. He also served as an advisor to the UNDP Knowledge Based Systems Project in India, and to DFKI, the German Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Recently he has been an advisor to the Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, of the World Health Organization in Geneva. Kowalski is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the European Association for Artificial Intelligence,  and the Association for Computing Machinery. He received the IJCAI (International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence) award for Research Excellence in 2011, and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Award for Eminent Scientists for 2012-2014.