Originally from Heidelberg, a town in the southwestern part of Germany, I studied Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the Clausthal University of Technology and the University of Freiburg. After spending a great year at Indiana University as an international exchange student, I decided to return to Bloomington for my Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Dirk Van Gucht, which I finished in June 2009. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim.

My research interests include machine learning, data mining, database theory, and formal ontologies. Together with Dirk Van Gucht and Marc Gyssens, I am developing a theoretical framework that unifies several important implication problems occurring in data mining, reasoning under uncertainty, database theory, and game theory. It involves methods from mathematical logic, probability theory, and lattice theory. A second research project is concerned with the design of algorithms that populate and extend a formal ontology for the discipline of Philosophy. Together with Colin Allen and Cameron Buckner, I developed InPhO, a system that combines statistical text processing, human expert feedback, and logic programming to extend and populate dynamic, formal ontologies. InPhO will be integrated in the editorial workflow of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, providing a unique opportunity to harness the knowledge of its editors and authors for our purposes.

News

• (11/27/09) I am on the program comittee of the First Workshop on Uncertainty in
  Description Logics (UniDL'10) at FLoC 2010.
• (11/09/09) I will serve as a PC member of the Extended Semantic Web Conference's PhD Workshop
• (11/08/09) I will be teaching the course "From Probability to Logic and Back: Markov Logic and its Applications to Computational Linguistics and the Semantic Web" at the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information
• (05/13/09) The paper "Logical Inference Algorithms and Matrix Representations for Probabilistic Conditional Independence" has been accepted at the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
• (05/08/09) The paper "Working the Crowd: Design Principles and Early Lessons from the Social-Semantic Web" has been accepted at the Web 3.0: Merging Semantic Web and Social Web workshop at Hypertext 2009
• (05/01/09) I will serve on the ISWC 2009 research track program committee
• (04/02/09) This August I will join the KR&KM Group at the University of Mannheim
• (03/09/09) InPhO has been awarded a 400,000$ grant from the NEH!

Selected Publications

• Mathias Niepert. Logical Inference Algorithms and Matrix Representations for Probabilistic Conditional Independence. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), Montreal, Canada, 2009. [paper]
• Mathias Niepert, Cameron Buckner, and Colin Allen. Working the Crowd: Design Principles and Early Lessons from the Social-Semantic Web. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Web 3.0: Merging Semantic Web and Social Web - (SW)^2  at ACM Hypertext, Turin, Italy, 2009. [paper]
• Mathias Niepert, Cameron Buckner, Jaimie Murdock, and Colin Allen. InPhO: A System for Collaboratively Populating and Extending a Dynamic Ontology. Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, 2009. (forthcoming)
• Cameron Buckner, Mathias Niepert, and Colin Allen. From Encyclopedia to Ontology: Toward A Dynamic Representation of the Discipline of Philosophy. In a special issue of Synthese, Springer-Verlag, 2009 (forthcoming)
• Mathias Niepert, Dirk Van Gucht, and Marc Gyssens. Logical and Algorithmic Properties of Stable Conditional Independence. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning. (forthcoming) [preprint]
• Mathias Niepert and Dirk Van Gucht. Logical Properties of Stable Conditional Independence. In Proceedings of the 4th European Workshop on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM), Hirtshals, Denmark, pages 225-232, 2008. (selected for plenary presentation) [paper] [slides]
• Mathias Niepert, Dirk Van Gucht, and Marc Gyssens. On the Conditional Independence Implication Problem: A Lattice-Theoretic Approach. In Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), Helsinki, Finland, pages 435-443, AUAI Press, 2008. (best student paper runner-up award) [paper] [slides]
• Mathias Niepert, Cameron Buckner, Jaimie Murdock, and Colin Allen. InPhO: A System for Collaboratively Populating and Extending a Dynamic Ontology. (demo abstract) In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, page 429, ACM Press, 2008. [abstract] [poster]
• Colin Allen, Cameron Buckner, and Mathias Niepert. The World is Not Flat: Expertise and InPhO. Selected papers from the Ninth Annual WebWise Conference. First Monday, Volume 13, Number 8, 2008. [article]
• Mathias Niepert, Cameron Buckner, and Colin Allen. Answer Set Programming on Expert Feedback to Populate and Extend Dynamic Ontologies. In Proceedings of the 21st International FLAIRS Conference, Coconut Grove, Florida, pages 500-505, AAAI Press, 2008. [paper] [slides]
• Cameron Buckner, Mathias Niepert, and Colin Allen. InPhO: The Indiana Philosophy Ontology. APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, Volume 7, Number 1, pages 26-28, 2007. [newsletter]
• Mathias Niepert, Cameron Buckner, and Colin Allen. A Dynamic Ontology for a Dynamic Reference Work. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Vancouver, British Columbia, pages 288-297, ACM Press, 2007. [paper] [slides]

Conference Presentations & Invited Talks

• On Implication Problems for Disjunctive Constraints. Logic Seminar, Indiana University, February 11th, 2009. [slides]
• Logical Properties of Stable Conditional Independence. Data and Search Institute Seminar, Indiana University, November 19th, 2008. [slides]
• Logical Properties of Stable Conditional Independence. Workshop on Probabilistic Graphical Models, Hirtshals, Denmark, September 17th, 2008. [slides]
• On the Conditional Independence Implication Problem: A Lattice-Theoretic Approach. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Helsinki, Finland, July 12th, 2008. [slides]
• Answer Set Programming on Expert Feedback to Populate and Extend Dynamic Ontologies. International FLAIRS Conference, Coconut Grove, FLorida, May 17th, 2008. [slides]
• The Implication Problem for Disjunctive Rules. Research Seminar in Databases and Data Mining, Indiana University, September 24, 2007. [slides]
• A Dynamic Ontology for a Dynamic Reference Work. North American Computers and Philosophy Conference (NA-CAP), Loyola University, Chicago, July 28, 2007. [slides]
• A Dynamic Ontology for a Dynamic Reference Work. ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Vancouver, British Columbia, June 22, 2007. [slides]
• Combining Statistical Language Processing and Defeasible Reasoning for Collaborative Ontology Learning. Research Seminar in Databases and Data Mining, Indiana University, March 5, 2007. [slides]
• Ontology Learning and Population From Text. Research Seminar in Databases and Data Mining, Indiana University, February 13, 2006. [slides]

Software

Geeky Facts