 |
 |
 |
A. Short Description
of LIACC |
A. Short Description of LIACC
The Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (LIACC)
of the University of Porto is a research centre that has already attained
a good degree of visibility at both the national and the international
levels. Its main aim is to pursue research, both at the theoretical and
practical levels, in order to increase the quality of software in what
concerns, for instance, declarativity, distributiveness, adaptativeness
and flexibility. The main areas of research are (in alphabetic order):
-
Computer Networks (launched September 2002): scalable Quality of Service
solutions, security services and signalling protocols in heterogenous and
next generation networks;
-
Declarative Programming and Parallelism: design and implementation (sequential
or parallel) of declarative programming languages;
-
Distributed Artificial Intelligence: multi-agent systems techniques and
applications, agents negotiation and adaptation, Electronic Commerce;
-
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: design and implementation of methods
for extracting of non-trivial, potentially useful and easily interpretable
information from data;
-
Logic, Language and Computation: algorithmic complexity, formal systems,
cryptography and language theory;
-
Machine Learning: design and implementation of automatic inductive learning
methods useful in classification and regression;
-
Innovative Applications: development of practical applications based on
recent languages and tools;
-
Coordination of Teams of Agents: agent-based robot control, hybrid architectures,
simulated robosoccer;
-
Optimization, Constraints and Heuristics: constraint programming, heuristics
and meta-heuristics for optimization and problem-solving;
-
Parallel and Distributed Systems: design and implementation of programming
environments with support for mobility and distribution of computations.
Results of this research have been extensively used by other institutions,
both in the academic milieu and in the industry, and both in Portugal and
abroad. Three examples of this are: the YAP Prolog compiler, the classification
system Ltree, and the ARCA Expert System.
LIACC provides a research environment for the activities of several
PhD students, and gives support to a MSc course in Artificial Intelligence
and Computation (in collaboration with the Faculties of Sciences, Economics
and Engineering to which most of the LIACC members formally belong), and
to other MSc courses in Computer Science (Faculty of Sciences).
LIACC participates in the activities of a few international research
networks, and has projects in colaboration with several institutions abroad
and in Portugal.
Since its creation, back in 1988, LIACC has been able to maintain a
good level of scientific production, as confirmed by previous independent
evaluations, while giving an important contribution to the formation of
a new generation of young researchers (as shown by the conclusion of 21
doctoral degrees in the period 1997/2002). With an increased number of
PhD holders among its members, the future prospects appear as quite favourable.
©LIACC, Universidade do Porto, 2003
|
|
|
A. Short Description
of LIACC |