An intelligent agent interacting with the real world will encounter individual people, courses, test results, drugs prescriptions, chairs, boxes, etc., and needs to reason about properties of these individuals and relations among them as well as cope with uncertainty. Uncertainty has been studied in probability theory and graphical models, and relations have been studied in logic, in particular in the predicate calculus and its extensions. This book examines the foundations of combining logic and probability into what are called relational probabilistic models. It introduces representations, inference, and learning techniques for probability, logic, and their combinations. The book focuses on two representations in detail: Markov logic networks, a relational extension of undirected graphical models and weighted first-order predicate calculus formula, and Problog, a probabilistic extension of logic programs that can also be viewed as a Turing-complete relational extension of Bayesian networks.

Design of cognitive systems for assistance to people poses a major challenge to the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. The Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistance (CoSy) project was organized to address the issues of i) theoretical progress on design of cognitive systems ii) methods for implementation of systems and iii) empirical studies to further understand the use and interaction with such systems. To study, design and deploy cognitive systems there is a need to considers aspects of systems design, embodiment, perception, planning and error recovery, spatial insertion, knowledge acquisition and machine learning, dialog design and human robot interaction and systems integration. The CoSy project addressed all of these aspects over a period of four years and across two different domains of application – exploration of space and task / knowledge acquisition for manipulation. The present volume documents the results of the CoSy project. The CoSy project was funded by the European Commission as part of the Cognitive Systems Program within the 6th Framework Program.