A hat trick of awards for Computer Science Department
Staff from the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems have recently won best paper awards at three top international conferences in computer science and artificial intelligence.
Staff from the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems have recently won best paper awards at three top international conferences in computer science and artificial intelligence.
The paper 'On the Decidability of Connectedness Constraints in 2D and 3D Euclidean spaces' by Dr Roman Kontchakov, Professor Michael Zakharyaschev, Yavor Nenov and Ian Pratt-Hartmann (both of the University of Manchester) was selected as one of three IJCAI-11 Distinguished Papers, from more than 1400 submissions. The award was presented at the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, in Barcelona, in July.
Dr Kontchakov and Professor Zakharyaschev and their co-authors Carsten Lutz (Bremen), Frank Wolter (Liverpool) and David Toman (Waterloo) were also invited to IJCAI-11 to present their paper 'The Combined Approach to Ontology-Based Data Access', which received the Ray Reiter Best Paper Prize at the 12th International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Toronto, in 2010.
In August 2011, the best paper prize at the 5th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, held in Galway, Ireland, was awarded to the paper 'Polynomial Conjunctive Query Rewriting under Unary Inclusion Dependencies' by Dr Kontchakov, Professor Zakharyaschev and Dr Stanislav Kikot (a research assistant at Birkbeck, working on the EPSRC project ExODA: Integrating Description Logics and Database Technologies for Expressive Ontology-Based Data Access).
Professor Mark Levene, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems said: "It gives me pleasure to congratulate the researchers from our Computational Intelligence group on their recent achievements, which have gained recognition from the international AI community. Their award-winning work on answering queries over semi-structured, overlapping, and semantically-related data on the Web, and on spatial representation and reasoning, is a substantial contribution to the development of the next generation of database systems."