Brandon's Home Page

Dr Brandon Bennett
Division of Artificial Intelligence
School of Computing
University of Leeds
Leeds , LS2 9JT, UK.

Email: brandon@comp.leeds.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)113-343 1070
Fax: +44 (0)113-343 5468

I am a Lecturer the School of Computing at the University of Leeds and a member of the Qualitative Spatial Reasoning group. My work is focussed on the development of logical languages for representing and reasoning about the physical world. I am particularly interested in spatial and spatio-temporal information, handling of conceptual vagueness and the construction of concept ontologies for information systems. Applications of this work include Geographical Information Systems, specification of the behaviour of intelligent artificial agents and Virtual World simulation. His first degree was in Computer Science and Physics and he has an MA in Philosophy. (Click here for a full CV in PDF format.)

Research Interests

  • Spatial reasoning (demo)
  • Automated theorem proving and decision procedures
  • Constraint satisfaction problems
  • Formal semantics
  • Modal and temporal logics
  • Reasoning about actions, change and physical processes
  • Ontology of material objects
  • Geographical information systems (GIS)
  • Logical languages for high-level control of robots or virtual agents
  • Reasoning with vague and uncertain information

    Teaching

  • Masters course in Object-Oriented Programming.
  • Final year undergraduate course in Knowledge Representation and Inference.

    • Administration

    Convenor of the School of Computing Staff-Student Committee ( web page -- accessible only to members of SoC).

    Events Organised

  • Organsier of a Foundational Ontology for Geographic Information Workshop, Ilkley, 17-18 April 2008.
  • Programme co-chair of the FOIS-06 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (Baltimore, 9-11th November 2006).
  • Chair of the 2004 Automated Reasoning Workshop (Leeds, 31st March - 1st April).
  • I (together with Pierre Grenon) organised a workshop on Fundamental Issues in Spatial and Geographic Ontologies, (September 23rd 2003, in conjunction with the COSIT'03 conference).
  • I am on the organising committe of the Automated Reasoning Worshop series.
  • Jointly with the Ordnance Survey I organised a workshop on Geo-Ontology (Sept 2002).
  • I was co-chair of the SVUG 2001 symposium on Spatial Vagueness Uncertainty and Granularity.

    • Groups, Projects and other Research Pages

  • The Leeds Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Group (QSR)
  • The Foundational Ontology Project
  • Managing Vagueness, Uncertainty and Granularity in Spatial Information Systems (VUG)
  • Logical Theories and Decision Procedures for Reasoning about Physical Systems (RAPS)
  • European Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Network (Spacenet)
  • The Region Connection Calculus page (RCC)
  • Forum for Automated Reasoning research
  • The first Leeds Spatial Reasoning Workshop (held 13-14.07.99)

    • Publications

    My publications are listed here. PDF or Postscript of most of the papers is also available from this page.

    My PhD thesis is entitled Logical Representations for Automated Reasoning about Spatial Relationships.

    Publications of all members of the Leeds QSR group can be found here. 

    Software Development

    During the RAPS project (see above) prototype software for spatial reasoning and was developed. This is written in SICStus Prolog using the Tcl/Tk interface. Click here for more details.

    Click here for an interactive demo of topological reasoning with the RCC relations. (This is implemented by encoding them into intuitionisitc logic and then using an intuitionistic sequent calculus theorem prover.)

    Resources