Abdallah Arioua, PhD

Postdoctoral researcher (abdallah.arioua@univ-lyon1.fr)
University of Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France)
LIRIS lab - Database team

About me

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Claude Bernard Lyon 1 with the Database Team in LIRIS laboratory. I am very passionate about research and teaching and I enjoy interacting with students and diving into challenging problems. I was very fascinated by human's reasoning faculties and for that particular reason I did my PhD about Artificial Intelligence because I believe that the best way to understand something is to try to build it. Right now, I'm trying to persuade you that I am an interesting person and a good recruitment material, I am explaining and persuading by appealing to certain form of arguments. In my PhD I studied the formal foundation of argumentation and explanation and their use in knowledge base systems when contradiction and inconsistencies are present. I recently finished my PhD from the University of Montpelier (France) and started a postdoc with Angela Bonifati in which I'm interested in dealing with contradictions and inconsistencies in structured and semi-structured data, i.e Relational and Graph Databases. My goal is to understand the limit of logical approaches proposed in knowledge representation and reasoning literature when it comes to heterogeneous and massive amounts of data. I taught web programming, software engineering and databases, and I believe that teaching is crucial not only for professional reasons but for self-improvement. Interacting with students and teaching new subjects was always enriching and informative. The ability to convey what I learn by making it simple (but not simpler) so that it can be within the reach of students' comprehension is a desirable skill that I acquired during my two years of teaching and I want to improve.


Research Interests
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
I am interested in Non-monotonic Reasoning, especially in abstract/logic-based argumentation and inconsistency-tolerant reasoning. The main problem that I am concerned with is how to reason in presence of inconsistency in ontological knowledge bases (Datalog+/-). Given a query and an inconsistent knowledge base, how we can answer the query in presence of inconsistency? (See the Durum Wheat Knowledge base)
Argumentation and Explanation
Reasoning systems lack an important faculty that jeopardizes the trust between them and the user. I work on argumentation and explanation to compensate such lack. I am interested in establishing a formal framework for explanation for knowledge base systems with persuasion faculties. Communication with the user is very important that is why I believe that explanation should be dialogical. Therefore formal dialectics and dialogue systems are in my research interests.
(See the DALEK framework for Explanation).
Databases and Data Quality
The violation of integrity constraints in Databases is a form of logical inconsistency. I'm interested in measuring data quality and databases repairing. My research focuses on Consistent Query Answering in Relational and Graph Databases. In addition, I am interested in user-driven repairing systems in which formal dialectics plays an important role.

Highlights
01/09/2016 - Postdoc at the University of Claud Bernard Lyon 1 On Graph Databases and Data Quality with Angela Bonifati.
17/10/2016 - PhD from the University of Montpellier on Explanation in Inconsistent Knowledge Bases.
09/12/2014 - Best student paper award in the 34th SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SGAI-AI 2014) for the paper "Query Failure Explanation in Inconsistent Knowledge Bases: A Dialogical Approach".
16/11/2013 - Started a PhD at LIRMM and UMR IATE in Montpellier (France) under the supervision of Patrice Buche, Madalina Croitoru and Jérôme Fortin.
30/07/2013 - Master's in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at University of Sciences and Technology HOUARI BOUMEDIENE, Algeria, Algiers.
2012-2013 Ranked 1/84 in the 2nd year of my Master's.
2011-2012 Ranked 1/126 in the 1st year of my Master's.
30/07/2011 Ranked 1/87 in Licence (overall ranking).
2008-2011 Licence in Computer Science, University of M'sila, Algeria.