Jae Hee Lee

Commonsense reasoning is a major challenge in Artificial Intelligence. As qualitative descriptions comprise a great deal of our everyday language, commonsense reasoning is concerned with developing and processing such qualitative representations. This applies especially to commonsense reasoning about space, where spatial objects are in particular characterized by their spatial relations to each other. Consequently, to endow spatial applications (e.g., CAD, GIS) with the commonsense reasoning ability, a thorough understanding of qualitative spatial relations is required. Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR), a subfield of AI, approaches this very challenge. QSR aims at providing calculi which allow a machine to represent and reason with spatial relations using a finite set of symbols. In my thesis, I want to investigate qualitative spatial reasoning with directional information in regard to its reasoning properties. As reasoning with directional information has a natural connection to real algebraic geometry, I apply symbolic, algebraic computation methods from real algebraic geometry. For more information see my PhD proposal.