Curriculum Vitae - Verónica Dahl

Chair, Prolog Education Group 2.0,
Lifetime Professor Emeritus, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University
Associate Faculty in Bioinformatics and in Cognitive Sciences, Simon Fraser University
Researcher, NSERC

Web: www.sfu.ca/people/veronica, Email: veronica at cs dot sfu dot ca

Veronica Dahl

Photo Credit: Elvira Eberhart, 2015

Short Bio

Verónica Dahl is an Argentine/Canadian mother, educator, literary writer, musician, composer and computer scientist who is recognized as one of the 15 founders of the field of logic programming.

Her scientific contributions in over 200 scholarly publications span the areas of educational development; doughnut computing; computational linguistics; deductive knowledge bases and virtual worlds; life sciences- in particular, computational molecular biology- and non-classical reasoning.

She was awarded a Marie Curie Chair of Excellence by the European Commission (2008-2011), the Calouste Gulbenkian Award for Science and Technology (2004) and received the Best Paper Award at the Third International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation (2009).

She presently chairs the Prolog Education Group 2.0 and is a member of the Advisory Boards at IMDEA Software and the International Federation for Computational Logic, as well as a researcher for NSERC and a Lifetime Professor Emeritus in Computing, in Bioinformatics and in Cognitive Sciences at SFU.

She received the Outstanding Achievement Award for Research, Teaching and Administration, SFU 2002-07; the 1999 CAGIS Distinguished Service Award; and the MSTL Innovative Teaching Program Award 1996-7, among others.

She has received as well three first prizes for her literary work in Creative Non-Fiction.

She has been President of the Association for Logic Programming, Chair of the Cognitive Sciences Program at SFU, member of NSERC's Grant Selection Committee, member of the Killam prize and Fellowship Selection committee, and Compulog Net/ Compulog Americas Coordinator.

As well, she is a member, past Board Member and past Publications Director of Science for Peace.

Her present research focuses on programming our way out of social and ecological catastrophes, and on linguistic diversity preservation through automatic grammar inference for under-resourced languages. As PEG 2.0’s Chair, she also leads an international educational effort to introduce computer-supported Reliable Thinking Skills as a subject in school curricula at all levels, in order to make logical reasoning and trustworthy coding skills more universally available.

Research Interests/Areas

At a time when society is being upended by ill-uses of formidable technologies like AI, I strive to help reorient these technologies towards social good. My scientific leitmotifs are to help generalize sound thinking skills and to help bridge the gap between the formal and the humanistic sciences, for a more humane, less dichotomized world. In the process, I have come to understand more about language in a general sense (including, for example, languages in terms of which molecular biology problems can be fruitfully expressed) and I typically produce results of both foundational and practical value for computational logic/linguistics/intelligence/molecular biology.

Click on each area of research for details on each: Educational Development, Doughnut Computing, Computational Linguistics, Deductive Knowledge Bases and the Web, Intelligent Methodologies for Life Sciences, Non-Classical Reasoning, and Other AI Tools.

Citizenship

Dual Argentine/Canadian

Academic Degrees and Studies

1977 Doctorat de Specialite en Intelligence Artificielle, Aix-Marseille II University
1976 Diplome d'Etudes Approfondis, Aix-Marseille II University
1975 Master's Thesis, Computing Sciences, Universidad de Buenos Aires
1974 Computador Cientifico, Buenos Aires University
1974 Bachelor's, Computing Science, Universidad de Buenos Aires
1974 Unconcluded studies in Literature, 14 subjects, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, Buenos Aires University
1968 Graduated as English language School Teacher from Escuela Normal de Maestras en Lenguas Vivas "John F. Kennedy", Buenos Aires

Professional and Academic Background

2022 – date Chair, Prolog Education Group 2.0 (https://prolog-lang.org/Education/)
2013 to date Researcher for Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Council (NSERC) under Discovery Grant #31-611024
2020- 22 Director, Regenerative A.I.
2017-20 Director, Curiessa Consulting Ltd.
2018-19 Technical Advisor, Minerva Intelligence.
2014-15 Visiting Professor, University of Ulm, Germany
2013- Lifetime Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University\
2008-2011 Marie Curie Chair, University of Tarragona, Spain
2004-2007 Foreign Collaborator, CONTROL project (with Denmark and France)
2003 Directeur de Recherche Etranger, CNRS, LPL, Université de Provence, France
2002 Consultant, Vancouver Software Labs
2001 to 2005 Founder and Chairperson, LifeIntel (http://www.lifeintel.com)
1986 Director, Logic and Functional Programming Laboratory, Simon Fraser University
1995 Industrial Fellow, MPR Teltech Ltd., British Columbia
1998-99 Chair, Cognitive Sciences Program, Simon Fraser University
1991 to date Professor, School of Computing Sciences, Simon Fraser University
1987-88 Consultant, International Artificial Intelligence
1985-86 Consultant, IBM Toronto
1984- 2011- Researcher for Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Council (NSERC)
1982-91 Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University
1982 Visiting Professor, University of Kentucky
1981 Visiting Adjunct Professor, University of Bahia Blanca
1979-82 Adjunct Researcher, Argentine National Scientific Research Council
1978-79 Head of Systems Division, Vialidad Nacional, Argentina
1978-82 Adjunct Professor, Buenos Aires University
1976-78 Post-Graduate Studies Scholarship, French Government
1974-75 Researcher under contract, full time, Argentine National Institute of Hydrological Sciences
1973 Scholarship, Argentine National Institute of Hydrological Sciences
1973 Head of Teaching Assistants, Center of Advanced Studies in Exact Sciences
1973-75 Teaching Assistant, Exact Sciences Faculty, Buenos Aires University
1968-72 English teacher, various primary and high schools in Buenos Aires

Languages

Fluent in English, Spanish (both mother tongues) and French (8th year Alliance Francaise, Buenos Aires); some Italian and Portuguese, 3rd year of German at Goethe Institute.

Hobbies

Story writer; guitar player; vocalist (specializing in Latin American music); song composer, salsa, tango and West Coast Swing dancer.

Media Impact, Interviews

2024- Interview by Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande for the Women in Stem Oral History Project
2023- Interviewed by ACTUIA, No 11, p. 56 (2023)
2022- Interviewed in the documentary film: Alain Colmerauer, L’Aventure Prolog , 3:02
2021- V. Dahl Documentary “Transcendence”. Interviewed by CONICET (Argentina’s Scientific and Technological Council), for their Virtual Site for Women in Science and Technology
Interview by Mariana Silveiro , 2021 (in Spanish, except for the song at 47:02)
2018- Article in MEDIUM, by F. Grattarola (2018): Verónica Dahl — Founding Mother of Logic Programming
2015- Interview by Elvira Eberhardt: Gastprofessorin Veronica Dahl- Research and life between computers and tango. Uni Ulm intern - das Ulmer Universitätsmagazin, Nr. 331 (45. Jg.), Februar 2015 https://www.sfu.ca/content/dam/sfu/fas/computing/veronica-dahl/Dahl-uui331_feb2015-translation-3.pdf
2013- Interview for The Globe and Mail, by Erin Millar (2013): “Gender equality eludes ground-breaking scientist”

Academic Distinctions, Awards, Honours

24. Advisory Board Member, International Federation for Computational Logic (IFCoLog), as from 2010.

23. Best Paper Award, Third International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation (2009).

22. Chair of Excellence Award from the European Commission, for my work on Constraint Solving and Language Processing for Bioinformatics (2008-2011).

21. IMDEA Software Advisory Board Member, since 2008.

20. Killam Commitee Member (Canada Arts Council), 2007-2010.

19. Past President, Association for Logic Programming, 2005-2009.

18. President of the Association for Logic Programming, January 2001 to January 2005.

17. Honoured as one of the Founders of Logic Programming This is an honour bestowed by the Association of Logic Programming in 1997, to recognize the pioneers of the field:

Maurice Bruynooghe, Belgium
Keith Clark, UK
Jacques Cohen, USA
Alain Colmerauer, France
Veronica Dahl, Canada
Maarten van Emden, Canada
Herve Gallaire, France
Robert Kowalski, UK
Jack Minker, USA
Fernando Pereira, USA
Luis Moniz Pereira, Portugal
Ray Reiter, Canada
Alan Robinson, USA
Peter Szeredi, Hungary
David H.D. Warren, UK

16. Outstanding Achievement Award for research, teaching and administration, SFU 2002-07.

15. Director, FLoC, Inc. (Federated Logic Conferences): since 2004.

14. Chercheur Etranger, CNRS, LPL, Universite de Provence, France (March to June 2003).

13. Coordinator of the SIG Computational Logic and Natural Language Processing (CL&NLP) (a joint initiative of Compulog Net EU/the Americas) 1998-2001

12. 1999 CAGIS (Canadian Girls in Science) Distinguished Service Award

11. MSTL Innovative Teaching Program Award 1996-7

10. Women Scholars Award, Queen's University, 1995.

9. Senior Industrial Fellowship Research Award, MPR Teltech Ltd., British Columbia (1994-1995).

8. Calouste Gulbenkian Award for Science and Technology, 1994.

Photo: Uruguay, 2016

7. Appointed Member of the Canadian National Sciences Research Council's Computing and Information Sciences Grant Selection Committee, 1991-93.

6. Two research awards with CWARC, 1988-90.

5. Record-setting research contract with IBM, 1983-86.

4. Awarded a scholarship from the German Government for research, 1980 (had to resign for personal reasons).

3. Winner of the Third Prize for Scientific Production in Engineering Sciences, for Hydric Resources Optimization through Graph Theory, Gran Buenos Aires Area, Argentina. 1978.

2. Research Award from the French Government (BNIST #291-767), 1976.

1. Awarded a scholarship from the French Government for post-graduate studies, 1974.

A curiosity: three literary awards.

R1. Scholarly Publications

1. Summary of Contributions by Areas

1.a) Educational Development (see 2.a): Universalizing Logical Reasoning Skills at all educational levels and disciplines:

Throughout my scientific career, I have contributed both to educational policy (e.g. as co-founder of the Cognitive Sciences Program at SFU) and to interdisciplinary teaching methods that are holistic, collaborative, inclusive, student-interest driven, and supportive in content of our great human capacities for consciousness, caring and creativity. Content-wise, I focus on reasoning skills and their consistent use across all disciplines, and on how to develop the cooperative learning and problem-solving skills that the young will need to effectively address their future formidable, unprecedented challenges. My scientific pivot is logic programming, and my hope is that when reliable thinking skills become universal, they can help debunk the ancestral myth that domination- based societies are "natural" and "inevitable", for a real chance to evolve into the intelligently peaceful societies of partnership and cooperation that we direly need, and are moreover our natural tendency [*]. The area of research I describe next is meant as a bridge towards this end.

[*] Eisler, R. and Fry,D. (2019) How domination and partnership shape our brains, lives, and future. Oxford.

1.b) Doughnut Computing (see 2.b) :

In her book “Doughnut Economics” (2017), Kate Raworth visualizes through social and ecological indicators that together form a doughnut-shaped graphic, the gap between where we are and where we need to be, eloquently arguing for economic changes that could help us meet the needs of all within planetary limits. The social indicators used are those identified in United Nations’ declaration on Sustainable Development Goals [UN2015], which sets out the basics of life on which no one should be left falling short; and the ecological indicators demark the boundary beyond which humanity's pressure on Earth's life-giving systems is in dangerous overshoot [Steffen et al, 2015, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458]. Doughnut Economics has been adopted by many municipalities [https://doughnuteconomics.org/news/cnbc-meet-the-cities-betting-on-doughnut-economics]. This inspired us to develop user-friendly logical AIs we collectively call Doughnut Computing, to automate, for each given social and ecological indicator, the calculation of possible combinations of actions which could shift their present status into the desired safe and just space for humanity and the planet. These tools are particularly useful for educational and for collective planning purposes, as they allow students, planners and policy makers to explore consequences of proposed solutions, realize the need to gather trustworthy data within their city, province, country or region, realize the probable need to enact legal means or to make the existing ones be respected, and ultimately help implement sets of possible measures conducive to success.

[Raworth2017] Raworth, K. (2017) Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Chelsea Green Publishing

1.c) Computational Linguistics (see 2.c)

i. Flexible Parsing, Cognitive Modelling: From trying to create knowledge bases from human language ([Dahl1999b], [Dahl2002b]), the need for more flexible linguistic models became apparent. Among those aiming at accepting the typically imperfect input that results from spontaneous speech, we noted the Property based paradigm, evolved by Blache from Bès' original 5P formalism, which relies on property satisfaction between categories, allowing us to parse incomplete and even incorrect input in a very modular and adaptable way. I obtained a position as Chercheur Etranger at Université de Provence in order to develop a methodology for parsing Property Grammars which invisibly interprets linguistic descriptions as directly executable specifications, and shows all partial analyses even upon failure [Dahl+2004b]. More generally, our work shows for the first time that direct renditions of flexible, constraint based parsing formalisms can be made to run efficiently while preserving a one-to-one correspondence between the conceptual and the representational levels. Our results generalize into directly executable cognitive models ([Dahl+2004a]). With Kimberly Voll, we have investigated the use of these methodologies in error detection and correction of radiology reports as obtained from speech recognition. As well, we’ve developed methods for the intelligent reconstruction of implicit human language structures, both from an Assumptive logic point of view [Dahl+1997a] (which metagrammatically extends parsers so that implicit structures are understood from context), and from a constraint reasoning point of view [Dahl2004]. Applications to language processing include: application to coordination, with Dulce Aguilar Solis [Aguilar Solis+2004], and to long distance dependencies [Dahl2005].

With Philippe Blache, I have obtained very encouraging results on extracting noun phrases from arbitrary text (we use text from the newspaper Le Monde) [Dahl+2005], and with Baohua Gu, I have generalized these results into concept extraction through natural language-- specifically, we have adapted my parser to extract concepts as well as targeted syntactic phrases, and to use English rather than French, with encouraging results [Dahl+2007] [Dahl+2008b]. However, much work remains to be done on the semantic component.

ii. Automated Grammar Induction for Under-Resourced Languages: Womb Grammars: Building on these results on Properties as Constraints, I devised a grammatical “womb” technology - Womb Grammars [Dahl+2012c, Miralles+2012] - capable of mapping a known grammar into the grammar of a different language, given only a set of positive but representative input sentences of that language, plus its lexicon. Undergraduate student Emilio Miralles helped me test this idea from an adaptation of my constraint-based parser for Property Grammars. Womb Grammars have been applied with my student Ife Adebara to the automatic generation of a Yoruba subset of noun phrases from a Womb Grammar system that used an English grammar as its source [Adebara2016], and to generating a fragment of the Mexican language Ch'ol [Dahl+2023a]. It is now being explored in co-supervision with Laura Cecchi of Leonardo Aluhe Correa for learning and teaching Mapu Che Zungun, a South American language in risk of extinction which has been insufficiently studied and for which there is no software yet [Correa+2025].

1.d) Language-proficient Knowledge Bases and the World Wide Web (see 2.d)

I have pioneered the area of deductive knowledge bases through developing in Prolog the first knowledge-based system (an automatic configurator of computer systems from the hardware and software description manuals of the series of computers SOLAR-16 [Dahl76] and the first relational database system in Prolog- both consultable in natural language [Dahl77] and many other subsequent developments listed in 2.d. I have cross-fertilized my computational linguistics expertise with that of knowledge based systems, yielding in research with Paul Tarau high level methodologies for endowing the internet with intelligent communication capabilities, e.g. multilingual access to virtual worlds over the internet [Tarau+1999, Dahl+1999]. Our prototype system, LogiMOO, accepts interactions in various languages, translates each to a controlled English based interlingua, and reacts in the language of origin. Underlying this system is a novel logic programming infrastructure for internet programming [Tarau+2001]. We have also studied models for virtual world and database creation from controlled English [Dahl+1997b] as well as developed and implemented theories for human language guided learning of mathematical software [Tse+2002], and for virtual environments for long distance learning [Rochefort+1999b, Rochefort+1999a,[Rochefort2002].Through supervision with Manuel Zahariev, I’ve contributed to concept extraction from human language, through the automatic reconstruction of the meaning of acronyms in web texts (Gold Medal Award Winner [Zahariev2003]).

1.e) Intelligent Methodologies for Life Sciences, in particular Molecular Biology (see 2.e)

Several years ago, the agreeable surprise that my research on Logic Grammars [Dahl1983a, Abramson+1989][] had been extensively used to help find the human genome convinced me that casting life sciences problems in linguistic/grammatical terms has enormous potential. I have combined this new interest with my own field of expertise in two ways:

With André Levesque and Manuel Zahariev, I developed efficient software for plant pathology identification from signature oligos [Zahariev+2009]. Our results, which are used daily now, reduced what used to be a six month-person effort at Agriculture and AgriFood Canada to an average 15 minutes of computing, and has also been used to complete the validation of an array for all Phytophthora species, with applications to agriculture (as one of the species is the causal agent of the Irish potato famine); to forestry (as another species is the causal agent of sudden oak death in California, Oregon and some parts of Europe); to marine sciences in Hawaii, where it is used to monitor biodiversity in coral reefs (Christopher E. Bird, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology); to entomology (Alina Cywinska of Brock University is using it for biting flies characterization, and Thieman for designing assays for mosquitoes, it is also mentioned in a book on Insect Molecular Genetics); and also for detecting fraudulent fish sales (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); and has been used as well for the description of new species of fungi parasitizing insects (Sundberg et al. 2021) and to characterize bacteria infecting patients after installation of internal medical devices (Morales-Laverde et al. 2022). It is now included for DNA motif detection into Virtool, a software for diagnostics of any viruses (Boyes et al. 2020). In a recent review, it was reported as a promising bioinformatics approach to detect pathogens from air samplers (Aguayo et al. 2021).

With Maryam Bavarian, I applied the high-level methods I have developed for processing language to the automatic analysis of biological sequences [Bavarian+2006] and to RNA secondary structure design [Bavarian+2005a]. A model of human language processing inspired in biological sequence replication and nucleotide bindings came to my mind from all this work which I explored with my undergraduate student Erez Maharshak [Dahl+2009]. Our presentation of this model received a Best Paper Award [Dahl+2009a].

1.f) Non-Classical Reasoning and Constraint Solving (see 2.f)

I have helped advance the field of automatic constraint solving, with particular focus on its intersections with Logic Programming [Christiansen+2005, Dahl+2004, Dahl+2004b], Computational Linguistics [Dahl1986a, Dahl1992, Abramson+1995, Tarau+1995, Dahl+1996, Tarau+1996, Li1998, Miralles+2012, Dahl+2012a, Dahl2005, Dahl+2005, Blache+2009], Bioinformatics [Dahl+2006, Bavarian+2005a, b, Dahl2004] and Social Sciences [Dahl+2012b]. My foundational work with Paul Tarau on hypothetical reasoning capabilities through a) linear affine intuitionistic and timeless assumptions, and b) abduction was incorporated into versions of Prolog such as BinProlog and CHR (Constraint Handling Rules). With Henning Christiansen, I next developed Hyprolog, which introduced these hypothetical reasoning constraint-based primitives into Prolog, in a new flexible way in the interaction between different paradigms, including all additional predicates and constraint solvers that may be available through CHR, whose syntax it partially borrows from and is used to implement integrity constraints associated to assumptions or to abducibles. Building on all this, we co-developed Constraint Handling Rule Grammars (CHRG), which became the standard language processing means for CHR. I also inaugurated (with H. Christiansen, J. Gallagher, J. Villadsen and P. Blache) the CSLP workshop and book series Constraint Solving and Language Processing [Christiansen+2004a]. Strong evidence of the foundational significance of my research in this field is our having been included in CHR’s Hall of Fame in 2011 [**]. In recognition of my work on Constraint Solving and Language Processing for Bioinformatics, I was Awarded a Marie Curie Chair of Excellence 2008-2011 from the European Commission (success rate: 17%).

[**] Fruewirth, T. & Reiser, F. Eds. (2011) Constraint Handling Rules: Compilation, Execution and Analysis, ISBN 978383911591

1.g) Other AI Tools

Various developments and applications of interdisciplinary research.

2. Publications and Other Contributions by Areas

2.a) EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: Universalizing Logical Reasoning Skills at all educational levels and disciplines (back to 1.a)

2.a) i. TEACHING PROLOG FOR THE FUTURE

[Dahl2024e] Dahl, V. (2024) Dimensions linguistiques de Prolog: le passé, le futur. (Linguistic Dimensions of Prolog: the past, the present) Rev. Ouverte Intell. Artif. 5(2-3): 65-93.

[Warren+2023] Warren, D. S., Dahl, V., Eiter, T., Hermenegildo, M., Kowalski, R. & Rossi, F. (eds.) (2023) Prolog - The Next 50 Years, LNCS, no 13900, Springer, July 2023.

[Lierler+2022] Lierler, Y., Morales, José F., Dodaro, C., Dahl, V., Gebser, M., Tekle, T. (2022) Proc. 38th International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP 2022 Technical Communications / Doctoral Consortium, EPTCS 364, 2022 .

[Korner+2022] Körner, P. , Leuschel, M. , Barbosa, J. , Costa, V. S. , Dahl, V. , Hermenegildo, M. V. , Morales, J. F., Wielemaker, J. , Diaz, D. , Abreu, S. & Ciatto, G. (2022) Fifty Years of Prolog and Beyond, https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10816.

2.a) ii. EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR SECURING AN EQUITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

[Cecchi+2024a]. Cecchi, L and Dahl, V. (2024) Nourishing girls’ passion for Computing Sciences: let’s eliminate barriers and build bridges. In Proc. LAWCC@CLEI2024 (https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3872/), pp. 110-121.

[Dahl+2023] Dahl, V. and L. Cecchi (2023) The Transformational Power of Education through Prolog (El poder transformador de la Educación a través de Prolog) – JADiCC 2023.

[Dahl2020] Dahl, V. (2020) Women and Diversities in Technology: why and how to balance their participation in the Engineering Sciences, Invited Speech. In: University Forum of the Future- Equality in Justice and Technology, Buenos Aires.

[Dahl2018a] Dahl, V. (2018) The case for machine assisted, collective, representative decision-making, pp. 35-36. In: Gomez, e. (ed.) Proc. First Humaint Workshop, Barcelona, Spain, March 5-6 2018.

[Dahl2018b] Dahl, V. (2018) Summary of the Panel Discussion: "Algorithms' Impact on Human Behaviour", pp. 37-38. In: Gomez, e. (ed.) Proc. First Humaint Workshop, Barcelona, Spain, March 5-6 2018.

[Dahl+2012a] Dahl, V., Coleman, B., Miralles, J.E., Maharshak, E. (2012) CHR for Social Responsibility. In: ICLP Technical Communications 2012, Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 17, pp. 370-380.

See also 2.b) v. [Dahl2021, Dahl+2022], under 2.b).

2.a) iii. TEACHING LOGIC AND REASONING SKILLS TO CHILDREN

[Cecchi+2023b] Cecchi, L., Rodriguez, J. & Dahl, V. (2023) Logic Programming at Elementary School: Why, What and How Should We Teach Logic Programming to ChildrenMiralles, in Prolog - The Next 50 Years (D. S.Warren, V. Dahl, T. Eiter, M. Hermenegildo, R. Kowalski & F. Rossi, éds.), LNCS, no 13900, Springer.

2.a) iv. TEACHING PROFICIENCY WITH HUMAN LANGUAGES/ GRAMMARS

[Dahl+2012b] Dahl, V., Miralles, J.E., and Becerra, L. (2012) The role of Universal Constraints in Language Acquisition. In: 7th International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Language Processing (CSLP’12) - Post Proceedings.

[Miralles+2012] Miralles, J.E., Dahl, V. and Becerra, L. (2012) On Language Acquisition Through Womb Grammars. In: 7th International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Language Processing (CSLP’12).

[Abramson+1989a] Abramson, H. and Dahl, V. (1989) Logic Grammars, Springer Verlag (1989).

2.a) v. EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR GRAMMATICAL INFERENCE (useful for languages threatened with extinction)

[Correa+2025] Correa, L.A., Correa, L.A., Dahl, V., Rodriguez, J., Cecchi, L., Curapil, L. (in press, 2025) A grammar for a language in resistance: the case of Mapuche (Una gramática para una lengua en situación de resistencia: el caso del mapuche). XXVII Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación (WICC) Universidad Nacional de Cuyo - Mendoza - Argentina

[Dahl+2023a] Dahl, V., Bel-Enguix, G., Miralles, E. & Tirado, V. (2023) Grammar Induction for Under-resourced Languages: The Case of Ch’ol, In: Analysis, Verification and Transformation for Declarative Programming and Intelligent Systems, pp. 113-132 (J. Gallagher, R. Giacobazzi & P. Lopez-Garcia, éds.), LNCS 13160, Springer, 2023.

[Adebara+2016] Adebara, I. & Dahl, V. (2016) Grammar Induction as Automated Transformation between Constraint- Solving Models of Language, in Proceedings KnowProS (R. Bartak, T. L. McCluskey & E. Pontelli, eds.), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 1648, CEUR.

[Dahl+2012c] Dahl, V. and Miralles, J. E. (2012), Womb Grammars: Constraint Solving for Grammar Induction. In: J. Sneyers & T. Frühwirth, eds, Proc. 9th International Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules (CHR 2012), Budapest, Hungary, September 2012, KU Leuven, Department of Computer Science. Tech Report CW 62, pp. 32-40.

2.a) vi. NOVEL METHODS FOR TEACHING LOGIC/PROLOG TO STUDENTS WITH DIVERSE BACKGROUNDS

[Dahl+2023b] Dahl, V. and Cecchi, L. (2023) Introducing Prolog in Language-Informed Ways, in Prolog - The Next 50 Years (D. S. Warren, V. Dahl, T. Eiter, M. Hermenegildo, R. Kowalski & F. Rossi, éds.), LNCS,no 13900, Springer, July 2023.

[Dahl+2010c] Dahl, V., Cukierman, D., Bel-Enguix, G. and Jiménez-López, M.D. (2010) Logic Programming: Teaching Strategies for Students with No Programming Background. In: Proc. WCCCE’10: Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, Kelowna, B.C.

[Bel-Enguix+2009a] Bel-Enguix, G., Jiménez-López, M.D., and Dahl, V. (2009) Teaching Logic Programming Tools for Interdisciplinary Computing. In: Proc. European Computer Science Summit 2009: Informatics among the Sciences- Scientific Principles in Informatics. Paris, October 7-9 2009, pp. 31-40.

[Dahl1986a] Dahl, V. Logic Programming for Constructive Expert Systems. Database Systems and Applications. Benjamin/Cummings, 1986.

2.a) vii. TEACHING MATHEMATICS:

[Dahl+2011b] Dahl, V., Gu, B.H., Maharshak, E. (2011) Modeling Concepts and Relations through Property Grammars, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6686: 274-283.

[Tse+2002] Tse, S. and Dahl, V. (2002) Learning and using mathematics the natural way. Applied Mathematics Letters, Vol. 3.

2.a) viii. ASYNCHRONOUS LEARNING:

[Rochefort2002] Stephen Rochefort (2002) LPed ALE: A Multi-Agent System for Asynchronous Learning. E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare and Higher Education, Montreal, QC, 2002. (N.B. Dahl, V.’s contribution was through thesis supervision)

2.a) ix. MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS (Invited Talks, Editorials, etc.)

[Dahl2024a] Dahl, V. (2024) How much human intelligence hides inside AI, and how much coercion hides in natural language? Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oct. 18.

[Dahl2024b] Dahl, V. (2024) How natural or artificial are the languages thus denominated? At Universidad del Comahue, Argentina, October 30, and at Instituto de investigaciones Filosoficas de SADAF in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Nov. 1.

[Dahl2024c] Dahl, V. (2024) Program Chair Prolog Education Workshop 2024, at ICLP’24 in Dallas TX (see all fourteen peer-reviewed papers in: https://prolog-lang.org/Education/PrologEducationWS2024.html).

[Dahl2024d] Dahl, V. (2024) The transformational power of non-monotonic reasoning Keynote Speech, LPNMR’24 collocated with ICLP’20, Dallas, TX.

[Dahl2023] Dahl, V. (2023) Teaching Safety and Trustworthiness in AI with Prolog. In II.2.

[Dahl+2023c] Dahl, V. and Mascardi, V., Co-Program Chairs (2023) Teaching Prolog: the Next 50 years. Co-located with ICLP’23, London.

[Dahl2022a] Dahl, V. Program Chair (2022) Prolog Education Session, The Year of Prolog Symposium, Paris. https://sites.google.com/view/teaching-prolog-the-next-50yrs/committee

[Dahl2022b] Dahl, V. (2022) Prolog's Educational Potential (Potencial educativo de PROLOG). 51 JAIIO 2022 Video here, Minute 4:08:05.

[Dahl2019] Dahl, V. (2019). AI for Social Responsibility: Embedding Principled Guidelines into AI Systems. Keynote Speech at CodeMesh in London, and at Museo de Informatica, Buenos Aires (https://museodeinformatica.org.ar/2019/12/charla-de-responsabilidad-social-ia-por-veronica-dahl/)

2.a) x. Extra Teaching

The following is a sample of extra teaching as from when due teaching credit for research oriented undergraduate courses was discontinued.

2004-3 Special Res. Project       Work study program (2.5 contact hours/w., Naureen Sikder)
2001-1 Special Res. Project       COGS491 (2.5 contact hours/w., K. Voll)
2001-2 Special Res. Project       NSERC Dir. Studies Res. Award (3 contact hours/w., K. Voll)
2001-3 Special Res. Project       COGS490 (2.5   contact hours/w, Rhian Davies)
2001-3 Special Res. Project       CMPT 416 (2 contact hours/w., K. Voll)
2000-2 NSERC USRA Project   (3 contact hours/w., K. Voll)
2000-2 Special Res. Project       CMPT415 (2 contact hours/w., T. Yeh)
2000-2 Special Res. Project       CMPT415 (2 contact hours/w., B. Trigona)
2000-1 Special Res. Project       COGS490 (2.5 contact hours/w., K. Voll)

2.a) xi. New Course/ Academic Program Development

All the courses I teach are completely renewed at every offering. In addition, I developed from scratch the following completely new courses:

4. CMPT 880 (Logic in Computing Sciences) - new Area II course, first offering: Summer 2006.

3. CMPT 725 (Logical Methods in Computational Intelligence) - first offering: Spring 2006.

2. CMPT 817 (Natural and Visual Interfaces to Deductive Databases) - first offered in 2000.

1. CMPT 824 (Deductive Knowledge Bases with Natural Language Front Ends), first offered in 1992.

Various new offerings of COGS 491, COGS 490, ENSC 891, and CMPT 415.

As an area representative in the Cognitive Science Program Steering Committee since its inception, as a member of its Coordinating Committee, and as Chair of the Program, I have been heavily involved in developing this program.

2.a) xii. As Judge

CSS Student Poster Competition and Award Presentation meeting: March 1999.

2.a) xiii. Student Evaluations of my teaching

I am typically rated as excellent or very good by the majority of my students, when the normal level of expectation at the School of Computing Sciences is good to very good. Some of the feedback from students:

"Always wanting to come to class because she smiles all the time"

"Passion for topic, fairness, international credibility is highly valued, attitude towards students"

"This is the type of course that I would expect all upper division courses to be like. Veronica was able to bring a great deal of supplementary and up to date information into the course material. I found that I had some problems dealing with this course because I am used to taking courses in which the instructor merely restates what is in the text, I am not used to listening to someone who can actually bring some real intelligence into the course content."

"Her open style of teaching generated a lot of discussions in class and promoted motivation for learning out of class."

"Let me state at the outset that Veronica was great. She is very amiable towards students, and encourages interaction on a personal level, creating a feeling of goodwill and encouraging questions and comments."

"It's really neat to be reading a text on AI/NLP etc. and see the author cite Veronica's seminal paper ... (gives a feeling that these people really exist). Having a prof on the forefront of expert systems, prolog, etc. is very exciting for her students."

"Veronica is always ready to receive people in her office, provide help, suggestions, research material."

"She was very enthusiastic about the material and tried to get the students on top of the fast paced material."

"Excellent rapport with students; really tries to get to know her students."

"Always available for help, or endless resources available."

"Off the top of my head, only Veronica, R. Tront and D. Fracchia know how to foster peak performers or provide an environment that encourages research -which is where TRUE learning comes in. She is one of a few profs whom I want to do well for and not disappoint."

"Excellent speaker, very fair with students, best teacher I've had so far in Comp-Sci."

"Strongest points: Communication, knowledge, research ability, beautiful smile, flexibility." :-)

Comments from alumni

"I enjoyed taking courses with you and talking with you. I've learned not only Prolog, CHRG, presentation and writing skills, but most importantly, I was inspired a lot by you. I still remember clearly that you encouraged us to dare to dream and aim high. Now I am aiming high and I would like to continue to PhD studies"

2.b) DOUGHNUT COMPUTING (back to 1.b)

[Dahl+2022] Dahl, V. & J. J. Moreno-Navarro (2022) Doughnut Computing in City Planning for Achieving Human and Planetary Rights, in Bio-inspired Systems and Applications: from Robotics to Ambient Intelligence (Cham) (J. M. Ferrández Vicente, J. R. Álvarez-Sánchez, F. de la Paz López & H. Adeli, eds.), Springer International Publishing, p. 562-572.

[Dahl2021] Dahl, V. (2021) Doughnut computing: aiming at human and ecological well-being, (pp.28-32) in Proceedings 6th International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing (HAPOC-6).

2.c) COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS/LOGIC (back to 1.c)

[Dahl1995] Dahl, V. (1995) Introduction to the Special Issue: Computational Linguistics and Logic Programming, The Journal of Logic Programming.

[Dahl1999a] Dahl, V. (1999) Encyclopedia Entry: Logic Programming and Languages. In: J. G. Webster (ed.) Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, vol. 11, 576:580.

[Lloyd+2000] Lloyd, J., Dahl, V., Furbach, U., Kerber, M., Lau, K.-K., Palamidessi, C., Pereira, L.M., Sagiv, Y. and Stuckey, P.J. (eds.) (2000) Computational Logic. Lecture Notes in AI, Springer, Vol. 1861.

2.c) i. Logic Grammars

[Abramson+1989b] Abramson, H. and Dahl, V. Logic Grammars. Monograph, Symbolic Computation AI Series. Springer-Verlag, 1989.

R2. Contributions through supervision

C. Jendreiko and V. Dahl (2024) interviewed potential applicants in Düsseldorf for their joint project “Logical AI for Principled Design and Societal Empowerment”. This project uses automatic reasoning and logic programming as artistic and societal planning tools, allowing students to create their own aesthetic and social transformation expressions and explorations.

[Correa2024] Leonardo Aluhe Correa (2024) started his thesis project for the Licenciatura en Ciencias de la Computación in, (Facultad de Informática, Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Neuquén, Argentina). co-supervised by V. Dahl and L. Cecchi, on applying Dahl’s Womb Grammar methods of grammatical inference to learning and teaching the (endangered) Mapu Che Zungun language, which has been insufficiently studied and for which there is no software yet.(see [Correa+2025])

[Tirado2023] Velina Tirado (2023) research project Grammar Induction for Under-resourced Languages: The Case of Ch’ol. Universidad Nacional de Mexico, co-supervised by V. Dahl and Gemma Bel-Enguix,

[He2023] Ma He (2023) completed a research project in 2023 where she experimented with translating Dahl’s logic grammar encoding of Doughnut Computing (a computational paradigm, developed by Dahl to enable solutions from K. Raworth’s visualizations of where we are at in human rights and ecological resilience, which computes combined solutions for social and ecological catastrophes) into Constraint Logic Programming. (Computing Sciences Department, SFU) under the supervision of V. Dahl and S. Abreu,

[Adebara2018] Adebara, Ifeoluwamini (2016/8) Master's Thesis: Inducing the Grammar of a Subset of Yoruba Noun Phrases Using Womb Grammars, Simon Fraser University CS Department, SFU) Dahl’s Principle Supervision

[Miralles] Emilio Miralles (2012/9 - 2014/3), BSc Thesis/Project Title: Womb Grammars and Their Applications, Simon Fraser University. Principal Supervisor

Present Position: iSoC Design Engineer, Intel of Canada, Ltd.

[Kim] Youngchan Kim (2009/9 - 2011/12), Thesis/Project Title: Unsupervised Segmentation for English-Korean Translation, Simon Fraser University. Co-Supervisor

[Saypil] Asgar Saypil (2009/9 - 2011/12) Master’s Thesis/Project Title: Resource Generation for Low-resource Languages, Simon Fraser University. Co-Supervisor

[Hasan] Fahim Hasan (2009/9 - 2011/12) Master’s Thesis/Project Title: Automatic Generation of Multilingual Sports Summaries, Simon Fraser University. Co-Supervisor

[Saghaei] Sara Saghaei (2009/9 - 2011/12), Master’s Thesis/Project Title: Parsing text into Knowledge Bases, Simon Fraser University. Co-Supervisor

[Becerra] Leonor Becerra-Bonach (2009/9 - 2014/12), PhD Thesis/Project Title: Language Intelligence for Pertinent Advice Mining. Universidad Rovira i Virgili. Principal Supervisor

Present Position: Associate Professor, Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France

[Perriquet] Olivier Perriquet (2009/9 - 2011/2) PhD Thesis/Project Title: Adapting RNA Design Methods to the Analysis of Poetry. Universidad Rovira i Virgili. Principal Supervisor

[Gu] Boahua Gu (2009/5 - 2014/2), Project Title: Semantic interpretation in Hyprolog and in CHR. Simon Fraser University. Principal Supervisor

[Tirnauca] Cristina Tirnauca (2008/9 - 2010/12) PhD Thesis/Project Title: Data Mining Approaches. University of Cantabria Santander. Co-Supervisor

[Bel-Enguix] Gemma Bel-Enguix (2008/9 - 2012/2), PhD Thesis/Project Title: Language Processing for Bioinformatics, Universitat Rovira I Virgili. Principal Supervisor

Present Position: Researcher, Institute of Engineering in the UNAM (Mexico)

[Dediu] Adrian Dediu (2008/9 - 2011/12), PhD Thesis/Project Title: Executable Grammars for Machine Learning (European funds), Universitat Rovira I Virgili. Co-Supersior

[Skvorstov] Evgeny Skvortsov (2009/9 - 2011/12), S Thesis/Project Title: Chemical Signalling - A Useful Metaphor for Resource Management, Simon Fraser University. Principal Supervisor Present Position: Software Engineer, Google Kirkland

[Kaviani] Nima Kaviani (2009/9 - 2011/12), Thesis/Project Title: Chemical Signalling - A Useful Metaphor for Resource Management, Simon Fraser University. Principal Supervisor

[Jimenez-Lopez] M. Dolores Jimenez-Lopez (2008/9 - 2014/12), Thesis/Project Title: Computational Linguistics Methodologies for Molecular Biology. Universidad Rovira i Virgili. Principal Supervisor. Present Position: Assistant Professor, Universitat Rovira I Virgili

[Sharifi2009] Sharifi, A. (2009) A Domain Aware Grammar for Parsing Requirements into Typed FOL. Master’s thesis, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada.

[Gu2008] Gu, B. (2008) Recognizing Named Entities in Biomedical Text. PhD thesis, SFU. Co-supervisor

[Voll2006a] Voll, K. (2006) A Methodology of Error Detection: Improving Speech Recognition in Radiology. PhD thesis, SFU, Canada.

[Bavarian2006] Bavarian, M. (2006) Design and Analysis of Biological Sequences using Constraint Handling Rules. Master’s thesis, SFU, Canada.

[Gu2006] Gu, Baohua (2006). Recognizing Nested Named Entities in GENIA Corpus. In Proceedings of BioNLP 2006, a workshop of HLT-NAACL 2006.

[Voll2006b] Voll, K. (2006) Closing the Gender Gap: Opening the Door for Women Leaders in Technology. Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering Science, Trades and Technology (CCWESTT) National Conference.

[Voll2006c] Voll, K., Atkins, S. and Forster, B. (2006) Improving the Utility of Speech Recognition Through Error Detection. Society for Computer Applications in Radiology (SCAR) Annual Meeting 2006, pp. 26-28.

[Bharadwaj+2006] Bharadwaj. P. and Molero, D. Metainterpretation of expert systems with certainty factors. Student Poster, ICLP'06.

[Maj2006] Maj, P. Knowledge Representation with Frames. Student Poster, ICLP'06.

[Aguilar2006] Aguilar-Solis, D. (2006) Learning Semantic Parsers: a Constraint Handling Rule Approach. Poster, ICLP'06.

[Barranco2005] Barranco-Mendoza, Alma (2005) Stochastic and Heuristic Modeling for Analysis of the Growth of Pre-Invasive Lesions and for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Early Cancer Diagnosis, SFU PhD dissertation. Nominated for the 2004 B.C. Advanced Systems Institute Innovation Award and the 2005 NSERC PhD Dissertation Award.

[Gu2005] Gu, Baohua (2005). Identifying Species-Specific Subsequences in Bacteria Transcription Terminators Using SVM. Presented at the International Symposium on Health Informatics and Bioinformatics (Hibit-2005).

[Zahariev2004] Zahariev, Manuel (2004) Automatic Expansion of Acronyms, Ph D dissertation, Winner of the 2004 Governor General's Gold Medal Award, Canada.

[Zahariev2003] Zahariev, Manuel (2003), An Efficient Methodology for Acronym-Expansion Matching, submitted to Human Languages Technology Conference, NAACL-HLT 2003, Edmonton, Canada.

[Fall1998] Fall, A. (1998) The Foundations of Taxonomic Encoding. Computational Intelligence 14 (4): 598-642.

[Schiel 1997] Andrea Schiel (undergrad-Co,1997) Generating Internet Based VRML Animations from NL.

[Fall1996a] Fall, A (1996) Reference Constraints and Individual Level Inheritance. Canadian AI Conference, Toronto: 336-348.

[Fall1996b] Fall, A. (1996) Sparse Term Encoding for Dynamic Taxonomies. Proc. Fourth International Conference on Conceptual Structures, Sydney, Australia.

[Fall1996c] Fall, A. (1996) The Evolution of Taxonomic Encoding Techniques. In Dahl, V. and Sobrino, A. (eds.) :201-231, Ensayos sobre Programacion Logica. Santiago de Compostela University Press.

[Fall1996d] Andrew Fall, Ph.D, 1996 Reasoning with Taxonomies 1996 SFU (Graduate Prize in Computing Sci., finalist for Best Paper Award, Canadian AI Conference 1996, CSS First Place Exhibit Award at ASI Exchange, 98; ASI Best Student Exhibit Award, 97 ).

[Fall1995a] Fall, A. (1995) Spanning Tree Representations of Graphs and Orders in Conceptual Structures. In: Proc. Third Int. Conf. on Conceptual Structures. Santa Cruz: 232-246.

[Fall1995b] Fall, A. (1995) Heterogenous Encoding. Ibidem :134-146.

[Fall1995c] Fall, A. (1995) An Abstract Framework for Taxonomic Encoding. Ibidem: 162-167.

[Fall1994] Fall, A. (1994) Sparse Logical Terms. Applied Mathematics Letters. 8(5) :11-16.

[Andrews1994] Andrews, J.A. (1994) Foundational Issues in Implementing Constraint Logic Programming Languages. In Proc. 5th European Symposium on Programming Languages, Scotland :74-88.

[Calder1993] Calder, J. (1993) Graphical Interaction with Constraint-Based Grammars. Proc. Third Pacific Rim Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vancouver: 160-169.

[Sidebottom1983] Sidebottom, G. (1993) Implementing a CLP(B) with the Connection Theorem Proving Method and a Reason Maintenance System. Journal of Symbolic Computation, 15 :27-48.

[Dorner1991] Dorner, B. and Hagen, E. (1994) Towards an American Sign Language Interface. Artificial Intelligence Review, 8 (2-2): 235-253. (N.B. more under section T2)

[Andrews1992] Andrews, J. (1992) Towards Proof-Theoretic Characterizations of Constraint Logic Programming Systems. In: Proc. Workshop on Proofs and Types in Logic Programming, Washington, D.C. Nov. 2992.

[Brown1987] Brown, C. (1987) Ph.D, 1987 Generating Spanish Clitics with CDGs

[Massam1985] Massam, D., PDF, 1985 Implementing Government-Binding Theory

[Massicotte1985] Massicotte, P. M. Sci., 1985 Generating Conceptual Graphs from Functional Structures

[Pattabhiraman1984] Pattabhiraman, T., M.Sci.,1984 Translating machine error messages, SFU

R3. Research Collaborations (other than the ones evidenced in co-authored publications)

8. Various collaborations with University of Ulm, Universidad de Rovira y Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and Universidade de Evora, Portugal, Regenerative AI Ltd, Minerva Ltd., and collaborations within PEG 2.0.

7. Collaboration since February 2004 with Roskilde University and Universite de Provence under the CONTROL Research Project, funded by the Danish National Science Research Council (four-year project).

6. Collaboration since November 2002 with Dr. Philippe Blache, on extensions of Property Grammars. Laboratoire de Langage et Parole in Aix-en Provence, France.

5. Collaboration with Vancouver Software Labs as consultant, on Plagiarism Detection.

4. Collaboration since April 2002 with my visitor Dr. Henning Christiansen, on CHR grammars.

3. Collaboration since 2000 with Agriculture et Agri-Food Canada: Automatic Discovery of Signature Oligos from large DNA Sequencing Alignments. Under contract from the Canadian Biotechnology Strategic Fund. Collaborators: Dr André Lévesque, Alma Barranco-Mendoza and Manuel Zahariev.

2. Collaboration with Institut Canadien de Technologie Linguistique, 1997, which resulted in the multilingually consultable LogiMOO system. Collaborators: Paul Tarau, Koen De Boschere, Marius Scurtescu, Stephen Rochefort.

1. Collaboration with MPR Teltech (Micro Pacific Research), in an English to French translation project, 1994. (Collaborator: Osmar Zaiane).

R4. Software Development and Technology Transfer

Almost all my publications rely on implemented software as proof of concept. Moreover, some of it has had commercial applications. For instance, my research on incomplete types resulted, with my PhD student Andrew Fall, in software for efficiently treating taxonomies which is used at present in Canada in the forestry industry, in medical domains, etc. Dr. Fall created his own (very successful) company around these results. The influence of my 2002 (unpublished) work with Maite Taboada and Manuel Zahariev on Plagiarism Detection software for Vancouver Software Labs is evidenced by its being used at about 20 post-secondary institutions across Canada. My recent research on plant pathogen detection is used daily by Agriculture and AgriFood Canada, and led to my own company of intelligent software for molecular biology applications. My work on Logic Grammars was extensively used in laboratories around the world for discovering the human genome.

R5. Sample Editorial Activities

Co-Editor, Warren, D. S., Dahl, V., Eiter, T., Hermenegildo, M., Kowalski, R. & Rossi, F. (eds.) (2023) Prolog - The Next 50 Years, LNCS, no 13900, Springer, July 2023.

Editor, Post-Proceedings of the 1st International Work-Conference on Linguistics, Biology and Computer Science: Interplays In: Series Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, Book, 2011/1 - 2011/12

Co-Editor, Proceedings of CSLP 2011, the 6th International Workshop on Constraints and Language Processing, Book - 2011/1 Editor, 1st International Workshop on AI Methods for Interdisciplinary Research in Language and Biology - BILC 2011, Rome, Italy, Conference Abstract, 2009/3 - 2011/9

Editorial Board Member, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), Journal, 2001/1 - 2010/12

Area Editor, Journal of Logic Programming (in the two areas: Applications, and Natural and Formal Languages), 1991 to 2005.

Associate Editor, Computational Intelligence, from 1985.

Editorial Board Member, International Journal of Expert Systems: Research and Applications, from 1987

Editorial Board Member, Conceptual Systems Journal, from 1996

Editorial Board Member: Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (until Dec. 31 2010)

Guest Editor, Special Issue: Constraint Reasoning for Expert Systems, International Journal of Expert Systems, 1992.

Co-editor, Dahl, V. and Sobrino, A. (eds.) (1994) pp.201-231, Ensayos sobre Programacion Logica. Santiago de Compostela University Press.

R6. Keynote Speeches

Dahl, V. (2024) The transformational power of non-monotonic reasoning Keynote Speech, LPNMR’24 collocated with ICLP’20, Dallas, TX.

Informatica Regenerativa: apuntar al bienestar humano y ecológico. Inaugural Keynote Speech, 50 JAIIO, Oct 18, 2021.

Hacia una Inteligencia Artificial Regenerativa y Redistributiva. Keynote Speech, Innosoft Days, Nov 27, 2020.

AI for Social Responsibility: Embedding Principled Guidelines into AI Systems. Keynote Address, CodeMesh, London, Nov 8, 2019.

Shapes in Logic Grammars. Workshop Shapes 3.0, a workshop within the 9th International and Interdisciplinary Conference, CONTEXT 2015, Lanarca, Cyprus

The modeling beauty of Constraint Solving. IJCAI-16 workshop KNWOPROS-16: Knowledge-Based Techniques for Problem-Solving and Reasoning, New York, NY, United States, (2015).

Advances in Artificial Intelligence- are we making real progress? Keynote Address, APICS'96 (Atlantic Provinces Council for the Sciences) Oct. 1996.

Prolog, Mumps and Fifth Generation Computing Keynote Address, MUMPS User's Conference, Chicago, 1985.

R7. Banquet Speech

A day in the life of a Prof, ICLP'02, Copenhagen.

R8. Sample Invited Talks

20. Towards Language-Competent Web Search. 13^th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, October 2010.

19. Long Distance Dependencies through CHR. Invited Talk, First International Workshop on Constraint Satisfaction and Language Processing, Copenhagen, 2004.

18. The heart's many languages: bridging the formal/humanistic sciences gap. Invited Talk, ASAI'04, Cordoba, 2004.

17. Computational Linguistics and Molecular Biology. Invited Talk, Roskilde University, Copenhagen, 2004.

16. Coordination en Langue Naturelle- une approche prédictive. InvitedTalk, Universite d'Aix-Marseille II, France, 2003.

15. Parsing GPs in one clause (my scientific One Note Samba). Invited Talk, Universite de Provence, France, 2003.

14. Logique, Linguistique et Traitement Automatique. Invited Talk, Universite de Provence, France, 2003.

13. Understanding Implicit Language Structures. Invited address, EPIA'03, Beija, Portugal.

12. A day in the life of a proof. Banquet Speech, ICLP02, Copenhagen.

11. How to speak so that your computer will listen. Invited Talk, PADL'02 (Practical Applications of Declarative Languages), USA,2002.

10. From Speech to Knowledge. Invited talk, School on Information Extraction (SCIE-99, Rome, July 1999).

9. Translating NL world descriptions into databases. COMPULOG workshop, Rome, 1999.

8. The logic of language. Invited talk to the meeting The Logic Programming Paradigm: Current Trends and Future Directions, Shakertown, Kentucky, April 1998

7. What logics are natural for natural language? Invited talk at Joint Declarative Programming Conference AGP98, La Coruna, Spain, 1998.

6. Code Migration with First Order Continuations.Joint Declarative Programming Conference AGP98, La Coruna, Spain, 1998.

5. Extending Datalog Grammars. Invited talk to mark my winning the Women's Scholar Award at Queen's University, June 1995.

4. Understanding and Translating Language- Challenges of the 90's. Invited talk to mark my Calouste Gulbenkian Award, Lisbon, Nov. 1994

3. Datalog Grammars. Invited talk at INRIA, Domaine du Voluceau, France, 1994.

2. AI systems for NL processing. BCIT Workshop, Vancouver, 1993.

1. What Linguistics can contribute to AI, Invited talk at the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Conference, Vancouver, 1992

R9. Conference Responsibilities

Tutorial Program Speaker

3. 2017 Workshop in honour of David Warren, Stonybrook, NY.

2. 1997 International Logic Programming Symposium: Logic Programming and Natural Language. Port Jefferson, NY.

1. 1987 IV International Logic Programming Conference, Melbourne, Australia.

Conference Chair

9. Program Chair at the Prolog Education Workshop at ICLP 2024, 2023.

8. Program Co-Chair at the Prolog Education Workshop at ICLP 2022 .

7. Co-Chair (with Paul Fodor), Mentoring Workshop on Logic Programming, ICLP 2021

6. Programme Co-Chair (with Ilkka Niemela), ICLP'07 (International Conference on Logic Programming), 2007.

5. Programme Co-Chair (with Phil Wadler), PADL'03 (Practical Aspects of Declarative Programming), 2003.

4. Programme Chair, CL2000 Stream: Logic Programming Implementations and Applications. International Conference on Computational Logic, London, 2000.

3. Conference Chair, KRUSE'97 (International Conference on Knowledge Retrieval, Use, and Storage for Efficiency; Vancouver, 1997.

2. Conference Chair, International Logic Programming Symposium, Vancouver, 1993.
1. Programme Chair, First International Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, Rennes, 1984.

ADMINISTRATION, SERVICE

A1. Local Chair

IJCAI 2001, Seattle: Local Arrangements Chair for Vancouver.

Program Committee Member

A2. Sample Program Committee Memberships

36. IBERAMIA/SBIA 2006 (Riberao Preto, Brazil)

35. CSLP'06 (COLING-ACL Workshop, Sydney, Australia).

34. LACL'05 (Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics).

33. ICLP'05 (International Conference on Logic Programming, Sitges, Spain).

32. ICLP'04 (International Conference on Logic Programming), Saint-Malo, France, 2004.

31. PADL '04 (Practical Applications of Declarative Languages)

30. PACLING 2003 (Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics)

29. JFPLC 2003 (Journées francophones de programmation en logique et programmation par contraintes)

28. (also co-founder) International Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, 1995, 2002 (NLULP)

27. ICLP 2002, Denmark, July 2002.

26. ICLP 2001, Cyprus, December 2001.

25. CogSci2000, the 22nd annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2000.

24. Fourth Symposium on Natural Language Processing 2000, May 2000, Thailand.

23. TAPD'00 (Tabulation in Parsing and Deduction), 2000.

22. PACLING99 (Pacific Rim Computational Linguistics Conference), 1999.

21. ICLP99 (International Conference on Logic Programming), 1999.

20. International Workshop on Distributed and Internet Programming with Logic and Constraint Languages (in conjunction with ICLP99)

19. Joint International Conference and Symposium on Logic Programming, 1998.

18. Iberoamerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1998 (IBERAMIA '98)

17. International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Industrial Applications NLP+IA 98. New Brunswick, August 1998.

16. Second International Workshop on Logic Programming Tools for Internet Applications, Belgium, July 1997

15. International Conference on Natural Language and Industrial Applications (NLP-IA'96), New Brunswick, Canada, 1996

14. International Conference on Logic Programming and natural Language Processing, Lisbon, August 1996

13. 1995 Joint Conference on Declarative Programming, Sept. 11-14, 1995

12. KRUSE'95, California, August 1995

11. GULP-PRODE 1995

10. ICLP 1994 (International Conference on Logic Programming)

9. International Conference on Computing and Information, 1994

8. Canadian AI Conference, Vancouver, 1994

7. ICCI 1994

6. International Symposium on Logic Programming 1993

5. First International Conference on Conceptual Structures, Quebec, 1993

4. Fourth International Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, Tokyo, 1993.

3. FLAIRS 93/94

2. International IEEE Conference on Distributed Systems, 1992.

1. IX Biennial Conference, Canadian Society for Computational Studies in Intelligence, 1992.

A3. Session Organizer and Chair

7. (2018) Algorithms’ impact on human behaviour. Presentation and moderator: Verónica Dahl. In: European Commission JRC Conference and Workshop Report: Assessing the impact of machine intelligence into human behaviour-an interdisciplinary endeavour. Proceedings of 1st HUMAINT workshop, Barcelona, Spain, March 5-6, 2018)

5. How high-level grammatical formalisms do we need for processing language? At the Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming Workshop (NLULP99), Las Cruces, New Mexico

4. Logic Programming- Reality vs. Utopia. Summer School, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Santiago de Compostela, 1993

3. An Interdisciplinary View of Constraint Reasoning, Canadian Artificial Intelligence Conference 1992, Vancouver

2. Distributed and Internet Programming with Logic and Constraint Languages, Workshop, ICLP99

Logic Programming Formalisms for NL Processing. LP Workshop, El Faro, Portugal, 1983

A4. Service Related Publications (unrefereed)

[U.11] Dahl, V. The Prez is Off the Hook! Long Live the Prez! Logic Programming Newsletter, vol. 18, No.1, February 2005.

[U.10] Dahl, V. (2005) The Early Days of Logic Programming: A Personal Perspective, ALP Newsletter Series: Historical and Personal Perspectives on LP, vol. 19, No. 2, May 2006.

[U.9] Dahl, V. (2005) A Message from the former ALP President, ALP Newsletter, vol. 18, No. 1, February 2005.

[U.8] Dahl, V. (2005) A day in the life of a proof (alternative lyrics for Antonio Carlos Jobim's song "Black Orpheus"). ALP Newsletter, vol. 18, No. 1, February 2005. (not serious enough to be counted :-) )

[U.7] Dahl, V. (2005) Alternative lyrics for Donald's song "Las Olas y el Viento", sung at the Departmental Christmas party (same comment :-))

[U.6] Dahl, V. (2001) A word with the President. Logic Programming Newsletter, vol. 14, numbers 2/3, May/Aug 2001.

[U.5] Dahl, V. (1998) The best kept LP secret- Latin Percussion. Logic Programming Newsletter, Volume 11/2, May 1998 , p. 20.

[U.4] Dahl, V. (1998) Yes, You Can- Letter to Young Women Scientists Blossoming in Men's Fields. In: Logic Programming Newsletter, 11(3):6, Aug. 1998. Reprinted from: SCWIST Newsletter, 14(1):4, Jan. 1997.

[U.3] On False Choices Affecting Female Representation in Science and Technology. From my Invited talk at CASCON'96 Workshop The Gender Gap, Toronto, Nov. 1996.

[U.2] Dahl, V. (second edition, 1995) Analysis of Female Underrepresentation in Computing Sciences Departments- What can be done. Simon Fraser University.

[U.1] Dahl, V., Kirkpatrick, D. and Pruzinkiewicz, P. Report on Internal Restructuring of NSERC's Computing and Information Science Grant Selection Committee. Technical Report, NSERC, 1992.

A5. International and National Governance and Service

9. Board Member, Science for Peace, 2021-2023

8. Killam Selection Committee Member: 2007 to 2010

7. President, Association for Logic Programming: Jan. 2001 to Jan. 2005.

6. Area Coordinator (Natural Language Processing) Compulog Americas

5. Coordinator of the SIG Computational Logic and Natural Language Processing (CL&NLP) (a joint initiative of Compulog Net and Compulog Americas)

4. Permanent Member of the Organizing Committee for Logic Programming Conferences (this position honours the Founders of the field)

3. Member, NSERC's Computing and Information Sciences Grant Selection Committee (1991-1994)

2. Reviewer for NSERC's Strategic Grant Program, 1994

1. Board Member, Science for Peace, 1995-97.

A6. SFU Governance

12. Director, Logic and Functional Programming Group: to date since its inception

11. Strategic Research Committee Member, Comp. Sci. School

10. Chair, Teaching Excellence and Load Rebalancing Committee, Comp. Sci. School, 2006-08

9. Chair, Gender Issues Committee, Comp. Sci. School, 2004-05, 2007-08.

8. Chair of the Cognitive Sciences Program at SFU: 1998-99

7. Chair of the Admissions Committee in the School of Computing Sciences

6. Chair, Scholarships Adjudication Committee, 1999 and 2000, School of Computing Sciences

5. Acting Chair, Graduate Studies (ten days in 00-2)

4. Senate Member

3. SFUFA Director

2. Area Representative, Cognitive Science Coordinating Committee (all ten years)

1. Departmental Contact Person for Academic Women, SFU (all ten years)

A7. Committee Memberships at SFU

19. Steering Committee for the Cognitive Sciences Program

18. Graduate Studies Committee, Comp. Sci. School

17. Hiring and Retention, Comp. Sci. School

16. Graduate Student Recruitment, Comp. Sci. School

15. SFUFA Teaching Issues and Growth Committee

14. Associate VP Academic Search Committee (university level)

13. Curriculum Standardization, Comp. Sci. School

12. Guest Member at the Women's Studies DTC

11. Canadian Research Chairs Planning Committee, Comp. Sci. School

10. Associate Dean of Grad Studies Search Committee

9. Member, Gender Issues Committee, Comp. Sci. School

8. SFUFA Salary Advisory Committee.

7. Tenure and Promotion Committee, Comp. Sci. School.

6. Faculty Search Committee, Comp. Sci. School.

5. Public Relations Committee, Comp. Sci. School.

4. Faculty of Applied Sciences Women (Dec. 92 onwards, contributions to documents such as the Strategic Directions document, and other issues, from the perspective of the faculty's female minority).

3. Member, Senate Graduate Awards Adjudication Committee (1996-98)

2. Member, International Undergraduate Student Exchange Committee (elected by acclamation, 1996)

1. Member, Senate Committee on International Activities, 1996.

A8. International Service, Service to other Universities, to the Community

8. As Jury Member in contests to fill academic positions, as external examiner, as external reviewer in cases of tenure and promotion, etc. (Edinborough, Auckland, Courant Institute, Beijing, Buenos Aires, France, Quebec,...)

7. As Grant Reviewer for NSERC, NSF (USA) and FCAC (Fonds F.C.A.C. pour l'aide et le soutien de la recherche).

6. Interviewed by the Knowledge Network re. gender issues in education, 1999.

5. Role Model at Science World's XX event for attracting girls into science, several times

4. Coordinator, Port Moody Chapter of CAGIS (Canadian Girls in Science), 1998-99.

3. Chaperone, CAGIS B.C. Science World Sleepover

2. SFU Representative with school counsellors, teachers and school board

1. Role model at Ms Infinity

A9. Professional Associations

7. Canadian Society for Computational Studies on Intelligence

6. American Association for Artificial Intelligence

5. Association for Computing Machinery

4. Association for Logic Programming

3. Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology

2. Science for Peace (former Publications Director, former Board Member, B.C. Chapter)

1. Society for Text and Discourse