AIRU student, Nicholas Leisegang, has won the best paper award at the recent JELIA conference, held in Georgia, along with co-authors Prof Tommie Meyer and Prof Ivan Varzinczak. It is an immense honour for a student to win this award.
Held at Kutaisi International University (KIU), the conference selected 47 peer-reviewed research papers from a highly competitive international pool. The winning paper, titled ‘Extending Defeasibility for Propositional Standpoint Logics, deals with “standpoint logics”. This logical system is aimed at dealing with the beliefs of multiple agents who may disagree with each other, while adding the ability to reason about the prototypical or “usual” beliefs of these agents, as opposed to just the possible or necessary ones.
Before joining the department of Computer Science as a PhD candidate, Leisegang studied maths and philosophy at UCT. “I grew interested in formal approaches to logic and reasoning. During my masters I became interested in using logic in a more applied setting with real world data that can be messy or incomplete. I mentioned this to some other students in the maths department, and I was put in touch with Prof Tommie Meyer who introduced me to non-monotonic reasoning.”
Founded in France in 1988, the JELIA conference takes place every two years with the goal of strengthening collaboration across disciplines and between theoretical and applied research in AI.
JELIA in the news: https://frontnews.ge/en/news/givi-mikanadzem-kiu-shi-evropis-saertashoriso-konpherentsia-gakhsna
Full original article can be found on https://sit.uct.ac.za/articles/2025-09-10-airu-student-winds-best-paper-award