Robert Anthony "Bob" Kowalski is a logician and computer scientist, who has spent most of his career in the United Kingdom.
Education
He was educated at the University of Chicago, University of Bridgeport (Bachelor in mathematics, 1963), Stanford University (Master of Science in mathematics, 1966), University of Warsaw and the University of Edinburgh (Doctor of Philosophy in computer science, 1970).
Career
He was inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1991, of the European Company-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence in 1999, and the Association for Computing Machinery in 2001. He began his research in the field of automated theorem proving, developing both SL-resolution with Donald Kuehner and the connection graph proof procedure. However, he is best known for his contributions to the development of logic programming, starting with the procedural interpretation of Horn clauses.
He also developed the minimal model and the fixpoint semantics of Horn clauses with Maarten van Emden.
With Marek Sergot, he developed both the event calculus and the application of logic programming to legal reasoning. With Fariba Sadri, he developed an agent model in which beliefs are represented by logic programs and goals are represented by integrity constraints.
Kowalski was one of the early developers of Abductive Logic Programming, in which logic programs are augmented with integrity constraints and with undefined, abducible predicates. This work led to the demonstration with Phan Minh Dung and Francesca Toni that most logics for default reasoning can be regarded as special cases of assumption-based argumentation.