We are pleased to announce that two employees of the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Opole – Dr. Barbara Morawska, Prof. UO, and Dr. Lidia Tendera, Prof. UO – have won the prestigious OPUS 29 competition organized by the National Science Center.
The OPUS 29 call for proposals is one of the National Science Centre’s flagship calls for proposals for basic research projects, aimed at scientists at all stages of their scientific careers. Projects can last from 12 to 48 months, and the call for proposals includes funding for research conducted in international cooperation and using large research infrastructures. The total budget of the competition is PLN 550 million. (ncn.gov.pl)
The project led by Dr. Barbara Morawska, Professor at the University of Opole (No. 2025/57/B/ST6/04535) concerns descriptive logics and their connections with corresponding logic games. Descriptive logics are currently one of the key tools for knowledge representation used, among others, in large medical ontologies and Ontology-Based Data Access systems. The aim of the project is to develop methods of inference – in particular concerning the subsumption and unification of concepts – in selected fragments of descriptive logics, taking into account the computational complexity of these problems and their links with stack games.
In turn, the project by Dr. Lidia Tendera, Professor at the University of Opole (No. 2025/57/ B/ST6/04170), entitled “Everything I know: a syntactic approach to just-knowing logic,” falls within the field of epistemic logic, which studies formal models of knowledge and ignorance of agents (e.g., humans, programs, or robots). The starting point is the classic “muddy foreheads” puzzle and the related reasoning about the state of knowledge of multiple agents. The project aims to develop a new, convincing formalism of the so-called “only-knowing” operator, combining existing approaches and allowing for better modeling of distributed knowledge systems over time.
The awarding of two OPUS 29 grants in the field of computer science to researchers from our Institute is an important success for the scientific community at the University of Opole. It confirms the high quality of our research in the field of logic in theoretical computer science and its applications in knowledge representation and multi-agent systems.
We warmly congratulate the professors on obtaining funding in such a competitive competition and wish them success in implementing projects that make a significant contribution to the development of modern theoretical computer science.