Research Highlights

Constraint Solving: included in CHR's Hall of Fame in 2011 (Constraint Handling Rules: Compilation, Execution and Analysis. Thom Fruewirth and Frank Reiser (eds.) ISBN 978-3-8-3-911591, March 2011).

Logic Programming: Honoured in 1997 by ALP as one of the world's fifteen co-founders of the Logic Programming field. (http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/projects/ALP/Organizing_Committee/) 

Computational Linguistics: Best Paper Award in 2009 for joint work with Erez Maharshak on DNA Replication as a Model for Computational Linguistics. High impact research monograph Logic Grammars, with Harvey Abramson.

Deductive Knowledge Bases: Pioneered the use of Prolog for deductive knowledge bases. Developed with Paul Tarau high level methodologies for endowing the internet with intelligent communication capabilities, e.g. multilingual access to virtual worlds over the internet. Supervised Gold Medal Award winner Manuel Zahariev's PhD thesis on  automatic reconstruction of the meaning of acronyms in web texts. Developed the field of automatic knowledge base abduction from text.

Computational Molecular Biology:
Developed a high-impact methodology for DNA bar-code discovery (SIGOLI [J.27], now called AODP (*)) with André Levesque, W. Chen and M. Zahariev, and applied it to plant pathology identification from signature oligos. This reduced what used to be a six month-person effort in Agriculture and AgriFood Canada to an average of 20 minutes of computing.  The same software has been used in particular to complete the validation of an array for all Phytophthora species.  This has very high impact for forestry, as one of the species is the causal agent of the Irish potato famine which is still a problem and another species is the causal agent of sudden oak death which is devastating California.  It is also being used in marine sciences in Hawaii to monitor biodiversity in coral reefs (Christopher E. Bird, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology), in entomology by Alina Cywinska of Brock University for biting flies characterization, and also for detecting fraudulent fish sales (**). It is also now included into a software for virus diagnostics, including corona viruses (https://www.virtool.ca/docs/manual/sources/papers/).

[J.27] Zahariev, M., Dahl, V., Chen, W. and Levesque, A. (2009) Efficient Algorithms for the Discovery of Oligonucleotide Barcoded from Sequence Databases.  International Journal on Molecular Ecology Resources.
(*) Zahariev, M., Chen, W., Visagie, C. M., & Lévesque, C. A. (2018). Cluster oligonucleotide signatures for rapid identification by sequencing. BMC bioinformatics, 19(1), 395.
(**) Rasmussen Hellberg, R. and Morrissey, M. T. (2011) Advances in DNA-Based Techniques for the Detection of Seafood Species Substitution on the Commercial Market. J. Laboratory Automation, 16:4,308-321.

Three-Way Interdisciplinary Work: Awarded the Marie Curie Chair of Excellence 2008-2011 from the European Commission for my work on Constraint Solving and Language Processing for Bioinformatics (success rate: 17%)

Further Evidence of International Impact: The influence of my work on other researchers is evidenced by its having been adopted in contemporary software (e.g. my work on linear affine intuitionistic and timeless assumptions was incorporated into modern versions of Prolog such as BinProlog and CHR Grammars), by its having helped in interdisciplinary endeavours (e.g. to help find the human genome (Ross Overbeek's ICLP'92 invited presentation, Washington)); and by its being referenced in prestigious journals, such as the Journal of Computational Linguistics, the Theory and Practice of Logic Programming Journal (formerly called the Logic Programming Journal), and ACM Transactions on Database Systems. Other than specific, specialised uses of my work, its lasting relevance is manifest in its also having been referenced in survey articles and in general and specific AI textbooks, such as Lugger and Stubblefield's  AI book, Covington's Natural Language Processing for Prolog Programmers, and David Poole et al's Computational Intelligence book.