Zeynep G. Saribatur |
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Since June 2022, I am a PostDoc (Hertha Firnberg Fellow) with my project "AURA - Abstraction for Understandability of Reasoning in AI" (funded by Austrian Science Fund (FWF)) at the Databases and Artificial Intelligence (DBAI) group at TU Wien. Previously, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the DBAI group and, before that, at the Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) group. I completed my PhD studies in December 2019 as part of the Doctoral College Logical Methods in Computer Science at TU Wien under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Eiter.
My research lies within Knowledge Representation and Reasoning with a focus on logic-based formalisms, in particular logic programming, and their applications in reasoning about action and change, with recent interest in incorporating more human-inspired abilities such as abstraction. In my dissertation, I introduced the novel concept of abstraction for answer set programming which showed potential in aiding understandability of programs by getting rid of irrelevant details. With my ongoing FWF Hertha Firnberg Project, I continue to investigate this research direction of building the foundations for good abstractions for understandability by also collaborating with cognitive scientists to conduct cognitive studies on observing the effect of abstract representations in understandability.News
- We are organizing a workshop on Theory and Methods for Abstraction (THEMA) as part of KR 2026! The workshop aims to bring together researchers from KR and related communities working on their perspective of abstraction in their fields, with the goal of exchanging theories and methods.
- We have a new project on learning abstractions for generalized reasoning accepted for funding by the WWTF! We are actively looking for two PhD students. See more details at the project homepage.
- Happy to be involved in the paper "Aligning generalization between humans and machines" which is now published in Nature Machine Intelligence! This paper has been led by Filip Ilievski as a derivation from the Dagstuhl seminar "Generalization by People and Machines", which took place in May 2024.
- Our abstract titled "What Can We Explain in Answer Set Programming?" is accepted at the workshop XLoKR 2025! Here, we overview the types of explanations that are covered by existing works on ASP explanations and what is missing.
- Our Dagstuhl Seminar Proposal, titled "Conveying the Essence via Abstraction: From Art to AI", is accepted! It is on a unique topic, exploring the visual art domain to understand the human abstraction ability in order to bring a fresh perspective to abstraction in AI. Further details can be found here.
Education:
PhD. in Computer Science, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria (2019)
MSc. in Computer Science and Engineering, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey (2014)
BSc. in Mathematics, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey (2012)
Professional Activities:
Member of the program committee of- 2026: PADL, AAAI, ICLP, KR, NMR
- 2025: PADL, AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, KR, ICLP, EPIA, Analogy-ANGLE II, XLoKR, ArgXAI
- 2024: PADL, AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, KR, ICLP, EPIA, Analogy-ANGLE
- 2023: IJCAI, KR, ECAI, ICLP, JELIA, XLoKR
- 2022: IJCAI-ECAI, KR, XLoKR, ASPOCP, ArgXAI
- 2021: AAAI, IJCAI (Senior PC), KR, XLoKR, ASPOCP
- 2020: AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, KR, ASPOCP
- Subreviewer for ICLP'21, ICLP'18, IJCAI'18, AAAI'16, KI'16, ICLP'13.
Co-organizer of the workshop on Theory and Methods for Abstraction (THEMA 2026) co-located with KR 2026.
Co-organizer of the Dagstuhl Seminar "Conveying the Essence via Abstraction: From Art to AI" taken place on Feb 22 - Feb 27, 2026.
Sponsorship co-chair of the 4th European Summer School on Artificial Intelligence (ESSAI 2026).
Steering Committee Member and Chair for Sponsorship Committee of KR Inc. (2024-2027).
Sponsorship co-chair of KR 2024 and KR 2021.
Co-organizer of the 16th and the 17th Workshops on Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP 2023 & ASPOCP 2024).
Co-organizer of the workshop on Recent Advances in Collaborative and Argumentative Decision-Making.
Local Arrangements Committee Member of IJCAI-ECAI 2022.
Co-organizer of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Workshops on Trends and Applications of Answer Set Programming (TAASP 2019, TAASP 2020 & TAASP 2022).
Award committee member of VCLA International Student Awards (2020, 2021, 2023, 2025).
Co-chair of the student session at the 27th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2015).
Career Breaks
Maternity leaves during July 2021 - May 2022 and May 2024 - March 2025.Projects:
1/2026 - 12/2029: Principle Investigator, Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) ICT25-044, Learning Abstractions for Generalized Reasoning in AI (LAGER) (with Thomas Eiter and Nysret Musliu as coPI's), € 799,932
6/2022 - 4/2026: Principle Investigator, Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Hertha Firnberg Grant T1315, Abstraction for Understandability of Reasoning in AI, € 246,120
Software
I have developed the prototype tools (ASPARO, DASPAR, mDASPAR) for the abstraction and refinement methodology on ASP programs.Publications:
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Johannes Langer and Ute Schmid.
Effect of Abstraction on Understandability of ASP Explanations: Work in Progress.
In Proc. 8th Workshop on Trends and Applications of Answer Set Programming (TAASP), November 2025.
[pdf]
- Wolfgang Dvorak, Zeynep G. Saribatur and Stefan Woltran.
Simple Guess-and-Check Programs: Strong and Uniform Equivalence Meet Again.
In Proc. 8th Workshop on Trends and Applications of Answer Set Programming (TAASP), Novemver 2025.
[pdf]
- Filip Ilievski, Barbara Hammer, Frank van Harmelen, Benjamin Paassen, Sascha Saralajew, Ute Schmid, Michael Biehl, Marianna Bolognesi, Xin Luna Dong, Kiril Gashteovski, Pascal Hitzler, Giuseppe Marra, Pasquale Minervini, Martin Mundt, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Alessandro Oltramari, Gabriella Pasi, Zeynep G. Saribatur, Luciano Serafini, John Shawe-Taylor, Vered Shwartz, Gabriella Skitalinskaya, Clemens Stachl, Gido M. van de Ven and Thomas Villmann.
Aligning Generalization Between Humans and Machines
Nature Machine Intelligence, 2025.
[link][pdf]
- Tobias Geibinger and Zeynep G. Saribatur.
What Can We Explain in Answer Set Programming?
In Proc. Sixth Workshop on Explainable Logic-Based Knowledge Representation (XLoKR), November 2025.
[link]
- Tobias Geibinger, Zeynep G. Saribatur and Stefan Woltran.
A Novel Equivalence Notion to Compare Answer-Set Programs over Multi-Layered Inputs.
In Proc. 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), October 2025.
[link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Johannes Langer, Anna M. Thaler, and Ute Schmid.
Towards Observing the Effect of Abstraction on Understandability of Explanations in Answer Set Programming.
In Proc. 48th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI), September 2025.
[link][pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Matthias Knorr, Ricardo Gonçalves, and João Leite.
On Abstracting over the Irrelevant in Answer Set Programming.
In Proc. 21st International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), November 2024.
[link]
- Iosif Apostolakis, Zeynep G. Saribatur, and Johannes P. Wallner.
Abstraction in Assumption-based Argumentation.
In Proc. 21st International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), November 2024.
[link]
- Iosif Apostolakis, Zeynep G. Saribatur, and Johannes P. Wallner.
A Semantical Approach to Abstraction in Answer Set Programming and Assumption-Based Argumentation.
In Proc. 17th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR), October 2024.
[link]
- Iosif Apostolakis, Zeynep G. Saribatur, and Johannes P. Wallner.
Abstracting Assumptions in Structured Argumentation (Extended Abstract).
In Proc. 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), May 2024.
[link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Stefan Woltran.
A Unified View on Forgetting and Strong Equivalence Notions in Answer Set Programming.
In Proc. 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), February 2024.
[link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Stefan Woltran.
Foundations for Projecting Away the Irrelevant in ASP Programs.
In Proc. 20th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), August 2023. [link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Thomas Eiter, and Peter Schüller.
Abstraction for Non-Ground Answer Set Programs (Extended Abstract).
In Proc. 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Journal Track, July 2022.
[link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Thomas Eiter, and Peter Schüller.
Abstraction for Non-Ground Answer Set Programs.
Artificial Intelligence (AIJ) 300 (2021): 103563. [link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Johannes P. Wallner.
Existential Abstraction on Argumentation Frameworks via Clustering.
In Proc. 18th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), September 2021. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Thomas Eiter.
Omission-based Abstraction for Answer Set Programs.
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 21(2):145-195, March 2021. [link][pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur.
Towards Comprehensible ASP Reasoning by Means of Abstraction.
In Proc. KR 2020 Workshop on Explainable Logic-Based Knowledge Representation (XLoKR), September 2020. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Thomas Eiter.
A Semantic Perspective on Omission Abstraction in ASP.
In Proc. 17th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), September 2020. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Johannes P. Wallner, and Stefan Woltran.
Explaining Non-Acceptability in Abstract Argumentation.
In Proc. 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), June 2020. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur.
Abstraction for ASP Planning.
In Proc. 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), June 2020. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur.
Abstraction for Reasoning about Agent Behavior with Answer Set Programming.
PhD thesis supervised by Thomas Eiter and Georg Weissenbacher, TU Wien, Institute of Logic and Computation, 2019.
[thesis]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Thomas Eiter, and Peter Schüller.
Abstraction for Non-Ground Answer Set Programs.
Technical Report. LOGCOMP RR-1923-19-01, December 2019. [pdf]
- Thomas Eiter, Zeynep G. Saribatur, and Peter Schüller.
Abstraction for Zooming-In to Unsolvability Reasons of Grid-Cell Problems.
In IJCAI 2019 Workshop on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), August 2019. [link][pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Peter Schüller, and Thomas Eiter.
Abstraction for Non-Ground Answer Set Programs.
In Proc. 16th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA), May 2019. [link][pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Volkan Patoglu, and Esra Erdem.
Finding optimal feasible global plans for multiple teams of heterogeneous robots using hybrid reasoning: an application to cognitive factories.
Autonomous Robots, 43(1):213-238, 2019. [link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Thomas Eiter.
Omission-based Abstraction for Answer Set Programs.
Technical Report. LOGCOMP RR-1923-18-06, December 2018. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Peter Schüller, and Thomas Eiter.
Abstraction for Non-Ground Answer Set Programs.
In Workshop on Trends and Applications of Answer Set Programming (TAASP), November 2018. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Thomas Eiter.
Omission-based Abstraction for Answer Set Programs.
In Proc. 16th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), October 2018. [link][pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur.
ASP-based Perspective on Reactive Policies with Planning.
In Workshop on ACTIONS@KR'18, October 2018. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Thomas Eiter.
Towards Abstraction in ASP with an Application on Reasoning about Agent Policies.
In Workshop on Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP), July 2018. [pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Chitta Baral, and Thomas Eiter.
Reactive Maintenance Policies over Equalized States in Dynamic Environments.
In Proc. 18th EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA), September 2017. [link][pdf]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur and Thomas Eiter.
Reactive Policies with Planning for Action Languages.
In Proc. 15th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA), November 2016. [link][pdf]
- Zeynep Gözen Saribatur.
Reactive Policy Checking for Action Languages.
In Doctoral Consortium of IJCAI 2016, July 2016. - Zeynep G. Saribatur and Thomas Eiter.
Reactive Policies with Planning for Action Languages.
In 16th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR), April 2016.
- Esra Erdem, Volkan Patoglu, and Zeynep G. Saribatur.
Bilişsel Fabrikalarda Nedensel Icra Takibi.
In 2. Türkiye Robotbilim Konferansı (ToRK), October 2015. - Esra Erdem, Volkan Patoglu, and Zeynep G. Saribatur.
Diagnostic Reasoning for Robotics using Action Languages.
In Francesco Calimeri, Giovambattista Ianni, Miroslaw Truszczynski, editors, Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR), volume 9345 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, September 2015. [link][pdf]
- Esra Erdem, Volkan Patoglu, and Zeynep G. Saribatur.
Integrating Hybrid Diagnostic Reasoning in Plan Execution Monitoring for Cognitive Factories with Multiple Robots.
In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2015. [link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Esra Erdem, and Volkan Patoglu.
Cognitive Factories with Teams of Heterogeneous Robots: Hybrid Reasoning for Optimal Feasible Global Plans.
In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2014. [link]
- Zeynep Gözen Saribatur.
Optimal Global Planning for Cognitive Factories with Multiple Teams of Heterogeneous Robots.
Master Thesis, Sabanci University, August 2014. [link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Esra Erdem, and Volkan Patoglu.
Coordination of Multiple Teams of Robots for an Optimal Global Plan.
In AAAI Student Abstract and Poster Program, July 2014. - Zeynep G. Saribatur, Esra Erdem, and Volkan Patoglu.
Hybrid Reasoning for Teams of Heterogeneous Robots: Finding an Optimal Feasible Global Plan.
In AAAI Spring Symposium: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics,
March 2014. [pdf]
- Esra Erdem, Volkan Patoglu, Zeynep G. Saribatur, Peter Schüller, and Tansel Uras.
Finding Optimal Plans for Multiple Teams of Robots Through a Mediator: A Logic-based Approach.Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, Special Issue: International Conference
on Logic Programming, 13(4-5):831-846, August 2013. [link]
- Zeynep G. Saribatur, Peter Schüller, Volkan Patoglu, and Esra Erdem
Bilişsel Fabrikalarda Birden Fazla Robot Takımı için Eniyileştirilmiş Ayrıştırılabilir Plan Hesaplanması.
In 21. Sinyal Işleme ve Iletişim Uygulamalar Kurultayı, pages 1681-1883, IEEE, April 2013.
Miscellaneous:
Runner-up for best paper award and for best student paper award at KR 2018.Finalist for best Cognitive Robotics paper award at ICRA 2015.
Member of the AngryHEX team (participant at Angry Birds AI competition): Semi-finalist of the 6th competition at IJCAI 2017, quarter-finalist of the 8th competition at IJCAI 2019 and the 5th competition at IJCAI 2016.