Adrian Haret

  • Project Assistant, MSc, MA
  • TU Wien
  • Institut für Informationssysteme 184/4
  • Favoritenstraße 9–11
  • 1040 Wien
  • Austria

Interests

Humans, we are told, are irrational and there is nothing to be done about it. We are bad with probabilities, systematically biased, overestimaters, underestimators, prone to rationalize our decisions in subservient ways. But if there is no hope for us, there might still be some for our robot children. Educated properly, they could grow up to be the sensible adults we never were. They could transcend the cognitive eccentrities pushing us toward the brink. For that to happen we should figure out what it means to be rational, and write it down in a manner they, the robots, will understand. What do robots understand? Mathematics, logic, algorithms. What do we understand? That it is good to change your mind, except when it is not. That it is good to work with others, except when it is not. That you can argue with someone and be a little wiser at the end. How do we make the agents of tomorrow see that? Things such as these are very interesting, I think.

Research

One part of me thinks about how to make belief change work for various Knowledge Representation (KR) formalisms. Questions such as: what does it mean to revise an argumentation framework? how can we aggregate Horn formulas? does it make sense to update preferences? Issues like these are useful, on the one hand, for taking belief change out of its propositional ivory tower and making it more relevant to the broader field of AI; and, on the other hand, for making belief change relevant to resource bounded agents: some KR formalisms are designed to make reasoning easy, and one expects a lean reasoner to be able to change its representation in an informed way. But then, if one stares at a belief change operator long enough, one sees that it is essentially a decision procedure. Revision is about having to decide what information to hold on to and what to discard. Merging is about combining information from different sources. In both cases the candidates are bits of information, and the belief change procedure selects the best choices available. So another part of me wants to think about problems of social choice: what properties are desirable when aggregating different types of information? what is possible and what is not? what does it mean to be rational, either on the individual or on the collective level? how do we model the beliefs, preferences or intentions of a group? More broadly, I am interested in understanding and modelling interactions between agents: economic, cognitive, cultural.

Current Position

I am a Project Assistant within the project EMBArg: Extending Methods in Belief Change to Advance Dynamics of Argumentation, led by Johannes Wallner. Since May, 2015, I am an associate student of the LogiCS DK at TU Wien, under the supervision of Stefan Woltran and Thomas Eiter. I was also a research assistant in the project Fragment-Driven Belief Change, led by Stefan Woltran.

Education

  • MSc in Computational Logic (2012-2014) from TU Wien, TU Dresden and FU Bolzano within the (sadly now terminated) EMCL program
  • MA in Theoretical Philosophy and Philosophy of Science (2010-2012), University of Bucharest
  • BSc in Mathematics (2010-2012), University of Bucharest (discontinued)
  • BA in Theoretical Philosophy (2007-2010), University of Bucharest
  • High school (2003-2007), Mihai Eminescu High School, Botoșani, Romania
  • Middle school (1999-2003), School Nr. 7, Botoșani, Romania
  • Primary school (1995-1999), School Nr. 11, Botoșani, Romania
  • Kindergarten (1993-1995), Kindergarten Nr. 9 and Nr. 2 (I think), Botoșani, Romania
  • No school (1988-1993), Botoșani, Romania

Handbook Chapters

  1. Marcelo A. Falappa, Adrian Haret, Gabriele Kern-Isberner, Stefan Woltran: Belief Revision and Argumentation. Handbook of Formal Argumentation, Volume 2. In preparation (expected 2020)

Journal Papers

  1. Adrian Haret, Stefan Woltran: Belief Revision Operators with Varying Attitudes Towards Initial Beliefs. In preparation
  2. Nadia Creignou, Adrian Haret, Odile Papini, Stefan Woltran: Belief Update in Fragments. In preparation
  3. Martin Diller, Adrian Haret, Thomas Linsbichler, Stefan Rümmele, Stefan Woltran: An extension-based approach to belief revision in abstract argumentation. Int. J. Approx. Reasoning 93: 395-423 (2018)
  4. Adrian Haret, Stefan Rümmele, Stefan Woltran: Merging in the Horn Fragment. ACM Trans. Comput. Log. 18(1): 6:1-6:32 (2017)

Conference Papers

  1. Adrian Haret, Martin Lackner, Andreas Pfandler, Johannes P. Wallner: Proportional Belief Merging. AAAI 2020: forthcoming
  2. Adrian Haret, Stefan Woltran: Belief Revision Operators with Varying Attitudes Towards Initial Beliefs. IJCAI 2019: 1726-1733
  3. Adrian Haret, Johannes Peter Wallner: Manipulating Skeptical and Credulous Consequences When Merging Beliefs. JELIA 2019: 133-150
  4. Adrian Haret, Arianna Novaro, Umberto Grandi: Preference Aggregation with Incomplete CP-Nets. KR 2018: 308-318
  5. Adrian Haret, Hossein Khani, Stefano Moretti, Meltem Öztürk: Ceteris Paribus Majority for Social Ranking. IJCAI-ECAI 2018: 303-309
  6. Adrian Haret, Johannes Wallner. Two Sides of the Same Coin: Belief Revision and Enforcing  Arguments. IJCAI-ECAI 2018: 1854-1860
  7. Nadia Creignou, Adrian Haret, Odile Papini, Stefan Woltran: Belief Update in the Horn Fragment. IJCAI-ECAI 2018: 1781-1787
  8. Adrian Haret: Logic-Based Merging in Fragments of Classical Logic with Inputs from Social Choice Theory. ADT 2017: 374-378
  9. Adrian Haret, Andreas Pfandler, Stefan Woltran: Beyond IC Postulates: Classification Criteria for Merging Operators. ECAI 2016: 372-380
  10. Adrian Haret, Jean-Guy Mailly, Stefan Woltran: Distributing Knowledge into Simple Bases. IJCAI 2016: 1109-1115
  11. Jérôme Delobelle, Adrian Haret, Sébastien Konieczny, Jean-Guy Mailly, Julien Rossit, Stefan Woltran: Merging of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks. KR 2016: 33-42
  12. Adrian Haret, Stefan Rümmele, Stefan Woltran: Merging in the Horn Fragment. IJCAI 2015: 3041-3047
  13. Martin Diller, Adrian Haret, Thomas Linsbichler, Stefan Rümmele, Stefan Woltran: An Extension-Based Approach to Belief Revision in Abstract Argumentation. IJCAI 2015: 2926-2932

Workshop Papers

  1. Adrian Haret, Stefan Woltran: Belief Revision Operators with Varying Attitudes Towards Initial Beliefs. NMR 2018
  2. Adrian Haret, Johannes P. Wallner: Manipulation of semantic aggregation procedures for propositional knowledge bases and argumentation frameworks. NMR 2018
  3. Adrian Haret, Stefan Woltran: Deviation in Belief Change on Fragments of Propositional Logic. DKB/KIK@KI 2017: 64-76
  4. Adrian Haret, Stefan Woltran: Distributing Knowledge into Simple Bases. NMR 2016

Informal Publications

  1. Adrian Haret, Johannes P. Wallner: Manipulating Skeptical and Credulous Consequences when Merging Beliefs. TU Wien Technical Report, DBAI-TR-2019-114 (2019)
  2. Martin Diller, Adrian Haret, Thomas Linsbichler, Stefan Rümmele, Stefan Woltran: An Extension-Based Approach to Belief Revision in Abstract Argumentation. TU Wien Technical Report, DBAI-TR-2017-106 (2017)
  3. Adrian Haret, Jean-Guy Mailly, Stefan Woltran: Distributing Knowledge into Simple Bases. CoRR abs/1603.09511 (2016)
  4. Adrian Haret, Stefan Rümmele, Stefan Woltran: Merging in the Horn Fragment. TU Wien Technical Report, DBAI-TR-2015-91 (2015)

Reviewing, Subreviewing and the Like

I've served, or will serve, as a reviewer or subreviewer for the following conferences:
  • ECAI 2020
  • AAMAS 2020
  • AAAI 2020
  • FoIKS 2020
  • IJCAI 2019
  • AAMAS 2019
  • post-CLAR 2018
  • CLAR 2018
  • KI 2018
  • Commonsense 2017
And for the following journals:
  • JAIR
I enjoy it.

Teaching

I've been serving as a teaching assistant for the Research and Career Planning Course, held by prof. Georg Gottlob at TU Wien, since 2016. I've also talked about belief change and its connections to rational (individual and social) choice in the course on Preferences in AI, also at TU Wien.

Grants

Over the years I have been fortunate enough to receive support from a number of sources. I was the beneficiary of a KUWI grant from TU Wien for a short-term stay abroad in Paris, at Univ. Paris-Dauphine, from October to December, 2017. I was then awarded a Marietta Blau grant from the OEAD for a stay abroad, also in Paris and also at Univ. Paris-Dauphine, for the period February-July, 2018. During this time I collaborated on some papers, saw the Bois de Boulogne go from green to grey to luscious green again, and listened to gospel music in the Saint-Vincent de Paul church. I was hosted in Paris by Jérôme Lang, to whom I am very grateful. Under his guidance I visited Toulouse and got to meet and collaborate with Umberto and Arianna. The Paris stay also resulted in a collaboration with Meltem, Stefano and Hossein. I'm additionally grateful to Nadia and Odile, who hosted me in Marseille at the end of January. In 2015 I was able to attend IJCAI 2015 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, thanks to a travel grant from the IJCAI organization. During my EMCL studies (2012-2014) I lived off a scholarship granted by the EMCL fund, without which I would probably not have been able to attend the program.

Academicalia

I helped to organize: