"When deep learning meets logic": a three-day virtual workshop on neural-symbolic integration sponsored by Samsung Research

More than 900 individuals from the international academic community, the industrial world, and the general public attended the virtual workshop on neural-symbolic integration entitled “When deep learning meets logic”, which was held on February 15-17, 2021. The workshop was co-organized by Loizos Michael (Computational Cognition Lab, Open University of Cyprus), Efi Tsamoura (Samsung AI Centre, Cambridge), Vaishak Belle (University of Edinburgh), and Phokion Kolaitis (University of California, Santa Cruz and IBM Research) and was sponsored by Samsung Research.

The recent wide-applicability of deep learning techniques in dealing with unstructured data (like text, images, and videos) at a massive scale has intensified the efforts to integrate this line of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research with another prominent AI paradigm: the use of symbolic knowledge and logic reasoning. Although these two strands of AI research have for the most part evolved independently, their interplay has shown a potential to give rise to a new computational paradigm in which symbolic knowledge extends and enhances the capabilities of deep learning systems, while also offering a path towards the grounding of symbols and the induction of knowledge from sensory data.

The synergy of these two paradigms was the timely topic of the workshop “When deep learning meets logic”. Featuring prominent speakers from world-class academic and industrial institutes, the workshop focused on exploring state-of-the-art solutions and their maturity for adoption by the industrial sector, and also on identifying some of the big questions that are still open for debate and research.

The workshop commenced with a talk by Professor Leslie Valiant from Harvard University, pioneer of computational learning theory, and recipient, among others, of the Turing Award for his transformative contributions to the theory of computation. The workshop concluded with a talk by Professor Christos Papadimitriou from Columbia University, recipient of multiple awards for his contributions to complexity and game theory including the IEEE’s John von Neumann Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award, and the Gödel Prize. Other speakers included renowned academics and researchers from RWTH Aachen University, Stanford University, University of Florida, University of Illinois, Google, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Georgia Institute of Technology, Samsung AI, and IBM Research.