September 2022 — Clayton Baker, MSc candidate in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town and member of AIRU, has been selected to attend the 9th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). The HLF is a prestigious networking conference that will take place in Heidelberg, Germany from 18-23 September 2022. Only 200 young mathematics and computer science researchers are chosen annually from a pool of competitive international applicants to participate in the forum. At the HLF, winners of the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize, the ACM A. M. Turing Award, the Nevanlinna Prize and the ACM Prize in Computing are invited to attend. Young researchers get the opportunity to interact with established researchers and career role models during lectures, panels and discussions. The format of the HLF encourages interdisciplinary and inspired scientific exchange, against the backdrop of the historic university town of Heidelberg.
Clayton is part of the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning research group at UCT. His Master’s thesis, “An Empirical Investigation for Patterns of Belief Change in Human Reasoning”, builds on previous work investigating the relationship between postulates of belief change and human reasoning. In his work, English translations of the formal postulates were judged by human participants for plausibility. The reproducible approach used in the experiment design and analysis was a key contribution of his thesis. Clayton’s goal is to complete a Ph.D. which bridges the gap between cognitive science and formal reasoning.
