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Commonsense Reasoning

Commonsense reasoning is a central part of intelligent behavior. As such, one of the major long-term goals of Artificial Intelligence is to endow computers with common sense.

Although we know how to build programs that excel at certain bounded or mechanical tasks which humans find difficult, such as playing chess, we have very little idea how to program computers to do well at commonsense tasks which are easy for humans. This may be partly due to the fact that in contrast to expert knowledge, which is usually explicit, most commonsense knowledge is implicit. One approach to this problem is to make this knowledge explicit. The goal of the formal commonsense reasoning community is to formalize this knowledge, as well as the methods used to reason with this knowledge, using mathematical logic.

This goal was first stated by John McCarthy in his landmark paper "Programs with Common Sense".

Commonsense Symposia

The Commonsense Reasoning organization runs a biannual symposium series devoted to publicizing advances in formal commonsense reasoning and developing the community of interest.

In 2011, the tenth Commonsense Symposium will be held as part of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series. For more information, please click here. For information about previous Commonsense Symposia, click here.

If you would like to become involved with the symposia or the community, please contact us.

Questions? Comments? Contact us at cs2009@commonsensereasoning.org.