Despoina Magka

Doctoral Student

desmag@cs.ox.ac.uk

01865283520

Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD

Biography

I am a final year doctoral student and member of the Information Systems Group led by Prof. Ian Horrocks. During my DPhil, I worked on knowledge representation and reasoning formalisms modelling non-tree structures, such as complex biochemical objects. Specifically, I built a theoretical and practical logic-based framework for the classification of graph-shaped objects based on their structural properties. In the context of this framework, I researched extensions of datalog rules with existentials in the head and nonmonotonic negation in the body and their application to automatically building taxonomies of manually curated knowledge bases.

Prior to that, I completed an MSc Computer Science degree in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford; for my MSc project and under the supervision of Dr. Yevgeny Kazakov and Prof. Ian Horrocks I outlined polynomiality conditions for the lightweight description logic EL when extended with numerical datatypes.

For my first degree, I studied electrical and computer engineering in National Technical University of Athens. In my undergrad project and under the supervision of Dr. Giorgos Stamou, I explored methods for connecting databases and ontological knowledge under the presence of uncertainty. In particular, I developed a java tool to convert database tuples into fuzzy OWL assertions according to user-defined membership functions.