Zenon Kulpa: Professional Interests

Current projects

The two main research areas I am recently working on are:

diagrammatics - knowledge representation and reasoning using diagrams;
qualitative analysis (especially interval analysis), mostly of mechanical structures, especially truss and beam structures;

They were/are partially supported by the following research grants:

No. 8 T11F 006 08 on "Hybrid reasoning systems in qualitative analysis of physical systems", under contract No. 515/T11/95/08 (for the period Jan 1995 - Dec 1997).
No. 8 T11F 006 15 on "Interval and qualitative methods of modelling uncertainty in physical systems" (for the period July 1998 - June 2001).
No. 5 T07F 002 25 on "Graph transformations in design of diagrammatic reasoning systems" (for the period Sep. 2003 - Sep. 2006).

all from KBN (the State Committee for Scientific Research).

Artificial Intelligence:

This is the general heading under which most of the rest of my interests may be placed. Some of my work concerned also more general aspects of AI, especially knowledge-based systems and knowledge representation methods (see the artificial intelligence section in my list of publications).

Links to various sources on AI over the Web are too numerous to list them here - use the many available navigation tools to find them (well, let me give just one link here, as a starter).

Diagrammatics:

This is the main area of my current interests and research. Diagrammatic representation uses diagrams to represent data and knowledge, and diagrammatic reasoning uses direct manipulation and inspection of a diagram as the primary means of inference. Diagrams are a visual kind of analogical (or direct) knowledge representation mechanism that is characterized by a parallel (though not necessarily isomorphic) correspondence between the structure of the representation and the structure of the represented.

My specific interests here concern issues of visual languages, and methods of efficient (and elegant) presentation and representation of complex data (in particular, analysis of diagrammatic errors, their causes and methods of avoidance), mostly in mathematics (particularly in interval algebra).

For more information, see:
Diagrammatics

Qualitative analysis:

It is one of the two main fields of my current research. Qualitative analysis is an area of AI research attempting to model the everyday, qualitative, non-numerical reasoning humans use to estimate (the range of) possible solutions to some real-world problems, especially in the case of inexact or incomplete data.

Specifically, I am working on application of diagrammatic representation, interval analysis and qualitative analysis to problems in mechanics (see the qualitative analysis section in my list of publications).

For more information, see the pages:
Qualitative Analysis - what's that?
Qualitative Analysis Group

Interval analysis:

Interval analysis and computation concerns the theory and use in numerical computation of the notion of intervals and arithmetic calculations with them. My work in this area concerns mostly the development of the diagrammatic representation system for interval algebra and its use for certain selected problems of interval arithmetic, see especially the two larger works: From Picture Processing to Interval Diagrams and Diagrammatic Interval Analysis with Applications.

For more about intervals, see:

[Button:] Intervals

Computer graphics:

Historically, my second field of research - I have moved here gradually from my image processing work. My main interests here concerned digitization methods and visual man-machine communication (see the computer graphics section in my list of publications).

Recently my work here is limited to the issues relevant to my main theme of diagrammatics, and reviewing work as one of the Executive Editors of the Machine GRAPHICS & VISION journal.

Image processing:

Historically, my first field of research. My main interests here concerned theory and algorithms for analysis of discrete images (especially geometric feature extraction) and software systems for image processing (see the image processing and analysis section in my list of publications).

Recently I exhibit little activity here, limiting myself mostly to editorial work as one of the Executive Editors of the Machine GRAPHICS & VISION journal.

Impossible figures:

A detour into the physiology of vision field - an area in part of professional, in part of personal and artistic interest. Impossible figures are illusions of spatial interpretation of flat pictures (see the impossible figures section in my list of publications).

My main finding here is that the sentences "impossible figures are impossible" and "impossible figures are possible" are both true and equivalent...

A few links on the subject:

Impossible World site: interesting texts on impossible figures, impressive library of images and artists.
Planet Perplex: a large well-annotated collection of optical illusions, ambiguous, hidden, impossible, puzzling and upside down images, and visual wordplay.
IllusionWorks, LLC pages - a presentation and explanation of a wide variety of visual illusions, including impossible figures.

Programming experience:

Programming languages:: Smalltalk-80 (Smalltalk/V; Objectworks; Visualworks); C; Pascal; Basic; Fortran; Algol 60; various Assemblers (including Z-80 and 80x86)
Computers/systems:: Sun workstations/Unix, X-Windows; IBM PC/DOS, Windows; Apple Macintosh/Syst. 6.1 & 7; various home computers and old (mini)computers (including the first Polish vacuum-tube computer UMC-1...).