Abstract: Human-centered applications involve a wide range of user-oriented computational challenges, such as flexibility, diversity, provability, hybridity, interactivity, and explainability.  Knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) plays an important role in addressing such challenges at various stages of developing methods for applications, ranging from modeling to solving, verification to explanations, and benchmarking to evaluations.  In this talk, I will focus on explainability and illustrate the usefulness of KR for explanation generation in two applications in the wild: answering complex biomedical queries for drug discovery, multi-modal multi-agent path finding with resource consumption.

Bio: Esra Erdem is a professor in computer science and engineering at Sabanci University, Istanbul. She received her Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, and carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto and Vienna University of Technology. Her research is in the area of artificial intelligence, in particular, the mathematical foundations of knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and their applications to various domains, including robotics, bioinformatics, logistics, and economics. Dr. Erdem was a general co-chair of ICLP 2013, a program co-chair of ICLP 2019, KR 2020 and PADL 2025, the general chair of KR 2021, an associate program chair of IJCAI-ECAI 2026, and the president of KR Inc. She is an associate editor for AIJ, JAIR and TPLP.