The VvL Logic at Large Lectures are annual, public lectures organised for a general audience. Upcoming Logic at Large Lecture:

Logic at Large Lecture 2024 - Larry Moss

The Dutch Association for Logic and Philosophy of the Exact Sciences (VvL) is happy to announce the Logic at Large Lecture 2024. The Logic at Large Lectures are an annual, public VvL event for a broad audience, featuring prominent researchers in logic and its applications. The details for this year's edition are as follows.


June 17, 2024, 16:00 CEST, online (Zoom)

Larry Moss (Mathematics Department, Indiana University, Bloomington): A Place for Logic in the Computer Processing of Language

Starting in 2018, computers have been able to carry out some tasks at human level (or better), tasks which are traditionally thought of as 'logical'.  These include the central task of logic: knowing 'what follows from what', when everything is presented in natural language.   We therefore at a watershed moment in the history of logic.  However, the computational systems -- neural net learners -- do not use logic in any evident manner.  Of course logic is involved in computer science at many levels, but the particular programs involved in inference are much more like the ones that memorize patterns and classify objects.  They do not use explicit symbolic reasoning of the kind logicians love.

Addressed to a general audience rather than to specialists, this talk is concerned with attempts by several groups of researchers to do reasoning in language on the computer, and to probe the deep learners to see how much they really can do, and to create hybrid symbolic/neural reasoning systems.

Program:

16:00-17:00 Lecture by Larry Moss

17:00-17:30 Panel discussion — panelists: Natasha Alechina (Open University & Utrecht), Larry Moss and Bart Verheij (Groningen)

17:30-18:00 Q&A with the audience

Organizers: Dominik Klein (d.klein@uu.nl) and Fan Yang (f.yang@uu.nl) 

Past Logic at Large Lectures

6 June 2023 Lukasz Kaiser (OpenAI): How Logic Shapes Transformers Lukasz Kaiser is a researcher at OpenAI, who works on fundamental aspects of deep learning and natural language processing. Prior to joining OpenAI, he was a Staff Research Scientist in the Google Brain team, where he co-designed state-of-the-art neural models for machine translation, parsing and other algorithmic and generative tasks and co-authored the TensorFlow system, the Tensor2Tensor and Trax libraries and the Transformer model, on which modern large language models such as ChatGPT are based. Before his position at Google, he was a tenured researcher at University Paris Diderot and worked on logic and automata theory. He received his PhD from RWTH Aachen in 2008 with a thesis on Logic and Games on Automatic Structures. Lecture by Lukasz Kaiser and Panel discussion on the role of logic in modern AI (panel includes Jan Broersen, Nina Gierasimczuk, Lukasz Kaiser)
31 May 2022 Joel David Hamkins (University of Notre Dame) Infinite games, frivolities of the gods Many familiar finite games admit natural infinitary analogues, which often highlight intriguing issues in infinite game theory. Shall we have a game of infinite chess? Or how about infinite draughts, infinite Hex, infinite Go, infinite Wordle, or infinite Sudoku? Let me introduce these games and use them to illustrate various fascinating concepts in the theory of infinite games.
28 May 2021 Moshe Y. Vardi (Rice University) And Logic Begat Computer Science During the past fifty years there has been extensive, continuous, and growing interaction between logic and computer science. In fact, logic has been called "the calculus of computer science". The argument is that logic plays a fundamental role in computer science, similar to that played by calculus in the physical sciences and traditional engineering disciplines. [Read more ...]