Logic Programming with Prof. Ehud Shapiro

We are incredibly fortunate to host Prof. Ehud Shapiro, a leading figure in the field of Logic Programming, for our upcoming meetup. Prof. Shapiro will share with us wisdom gained during several decades of shaping and tuning Logic programming in applications as diverse as Artificial Intelligence and DNA computing.

When John McCarthy proposed formal languages as a foundation for programming language design, he had more than Lambda calculus and Lisp in mind. In a paper from 1958, "Programs with Common Sense", John McCarthy envisioned logic as the underlying model for computer programs, particularly those that Artificial Intelligence was concerned with: common sense, deductive reasoning, “advice takers”. That powerful intuition was subsequently picked up by Dr. Cordell Green, an associate of McCarthy at Stanford, who proposed a clausal form of logic to be used in such endeavors–universal quantifiers and conjunction–, hereby laying the foundations for the field of Logic programming.

That approach in computing is far-reaching but also far removed from the mainstream. It has a totally different take on how to represent knowledge and encode computation. The “declarative” camp has found itself embattled and outnumbered ever since. The fulfillment of its promises has been pursued over the years with varying degrees of commitment, but none equaled that of the Japanese research project known as the “Fifth generation computer”.

A multi-departmental government project that spanned the eighties, the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) spearheaded products and technologies with Logic programming at its core. Flat Concurrent Prolog, invented by Prof. Ehud Shapiro, served as the base implementation for the Parallel Inference Machine, dubbed KL1, or Kernel Language 1.

Today, Concurrent Prolog is found in computational tools in the field of molecular computing. Shapiro's PhD student, Dr. Aviv Regev, showed in early 2000 how a process calculus can leverage logic programming to capture qualitative aspects of protein networks.

The association between our distinguished guest and a Clojure meetup is more natural than it seems. Itself a long time bystander in mainstream computing, Lisp has recently resurfaced as a force to contend with. Clojure has played a part in this transformation, spreading functional programming techniques in the industry, but also rekindling interest in Logic programming with a dozen of Kanren derivatives readily available, and core.logic commanding the lead.

Prof. Ehud Shapiro is the co-author of the "Art of Prolog". He currently runs a Bioinformatics lab at the Weizmann institute conducting research on the human cell lineage tree.