[plt-scheme] Vancouver Lisp Users Group meeting for October - The PLT Scheme Inference Collection

Hi all,

For our October lispvan meeting, Doug Williams will be presenting the
3rd component of the "Knowledge-based Simulation Environment" that he
has been developing in PLT Scheme over the past few years. I saw him
present the first of these components (the Science Collection) in
Colorado back in 2004 (there is a movie and pdf available of that
presentation). He presented the second component (the Simulation
Collection) here in Vancouver at the February, 2006 lispvan meeting
(the movie, presentation and related material are available as links
from my summary of the meeting). So, the Inference Collection is the
last component of Doug's "Knowledge-based Simulation Environment" and
is the one that I personally will be the most interested in seeing him
present!

Doug will also conduct a mini-workshop after the presentation which
will be a more hands-on and interactive means of experiencing the
code. So, be sure to bring your laptops!

Here's the "official" meeting notice:

Topic: PLT Scheme Inference Collection
Presenter: Doug Williams
Date: Thursday, October 26, 2006
Time: 7pm - 10pm (or whenever)
Venue: Think!, 4512 West 10th Ave., Vancouver (see map)
Summary: I am attempting to recreate - and extend - in PLT Scheme the
knowledge-based simulation environment I had originally developed in
Symbolics Common Lisp. It consists of three PLT Scheme collections:

   1. Science Collection: The PLT Scheme Science Collection is a port
of portions of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). It provides a
foundation of numerical routines for implementing the other
collections as well as providing data analysis functions. Version 2.0
included ordinary differential equation solvers. The current version
available from the PLaneT Package Repository is Version 2.4.
   2. Simulation Collection: The PLT Scheme Simulation Collection
provides a simulation engine for combined discrete and continuous
simulation models. The discrete simulation capability is based on a
process interaction model. The current version available from the
PLaneT Package Repository is Version 2.0.
   3. Inference Collection: The PLT Scheme Inference Collection
provides an efficient rule-based inference engine that supports both
data-driven (forward chaining) and goal-directed (backward chaining)
inferencing. The current version available from the PLaneT Package
Repository is Version 1.2.

In this talk, I will present the PLT Scheme Inference Collection. I
will discuss the functionality provided by the inference collection
with examples and demonstrations throughout the presentation. An
informal, hands-on workshop will be included where we will go through
installing and running PLT Scheme and the science, simulation, and
inference collections. We will go through developing and running
inference systems with the inference collection. So, bring your
laptops. The topics are:

    * Introduction
    * PLT Scheme Inference Collection
          o Inference Environments (Basic)
          o Inference Control
          o Assertions
          o Rule Sets
          o Rules
                + Data-Driven (Forward Chaining)
                + Goal-Driven (Backward Chaining)
                + Bi-Directional Chaining
                + Pattern Clauses
                      # Binding Clauses
                      # Existential Clauses
                + Patterns
                      # List Patterns
                      # Association List Patterns
                      # Vector Patterns
                      # Structure Patterns
                      # Object Patterns
          o Rule Networks
          o Conflict Resolution Strategies
          o Inference Environment (Hierarchical)
          o Assumption Processing
    * Future Plans
    * Questions and Answers
    * Workshop

This should be another terrific session! I plan to record the talk and
make it available on my blog, barring technical difficulties (knocks
on wood, rubs rabbit foot, crosses fingers), for people who are not in
the Vancouver area.

For those of you who want to have an advance look at the Inference
Collection (so that you can throw tough questions at Doug ;-) and
kibbitz intelligently during the meeting), you can download and run it
by doing the following:

   1. Download & install DrScheme from here
   2. Run DrScheme and change the Language level to" PLT/Pretty Big"
by selecting the menu option "Language/Choose Language..."
   3. Download & install the Science, Simulation, and Inference
collections from the PLaneT Package Repository by entering the
following statement in the DrScheme REPL:

      (require (planet "simulation-with-graphics.ss" ("williams"
"simulation.plt" 1 0)))
      (require (planet "inference.ss" ("williams" "inference.plt" 1 2)))

   4. Run the example programs in the examples directory (on my Mac,
they were installed in "~/Library/PLT
Scheme/planet/300/352/cache/williams/inference.plt/1/2/examples")

Incidentally, Doug also posts about his projects on his blog - check
it out to get some further insights into the development of his
"Knowledge-based Simulation Environment". See you at the meeting!

--
Bill Clementson
P.S. - Additional links are available on my blog posting of the
meeting: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/061003.html