Interview with Beishui Liao
Can you briefly introduce yourself?
I am a full professor of logic and artificial intelligence at Zhejiang University, China. Since 2014 I am a visiting professor of University of Luxembourg, and have well collaborated with Prof. Leon van der Torre in the area of AI and ethics as well as in many research projects.
What are the main research challenges you are working on now?
Currently I apply logic as a formal tool to deal with the reasoning of incomplete, inconsistent, and dynamic information. It has been well known that these kinds of information cannot be resolved by the classic logical methods. I develop new theories, methods and algorithms of formal argumentation and apply them to some real life applications, e.g. mining and reasoning with legal texts, and machine ethics, etc.
What are in your opinion the main research challenges in AIs, robotics and reasoning?
Recently I am leading a new project in the direction of AIs, robotics and reasoning, which is supported by the Convergence Research Project for Brain Research and Artificial Intelligence of Zhejiang University. We focus on the following challenges from two perspectives. In the perspective of human cognition, on the one hand we need to consider how AIs or robotics perceive what human need, on the other hand we as human have to understand what have been happened inside machines. Game theory is the second perspective of our research project. The human-AI interaction needs us to think about decision making via social networks where human and machines interact each other.
What is are favorite online resources?
Usually I do search papers and books via google and the data-base of Zhejiang University. I also read papers regularly from some international conferences in my field, like IJCAI, KR, and COMMA, etc.
What are your aims outside of academia?
Outside academia, there are still a lot to be done, such as how well can we connect theories to applications. We can do this by taking people from the industries into research discussions. We should also consider how to use logic to benefit the education. Logic can provide a good training of the critical thinking for the public. We will try to work on this hand in hand with the media.