This industry experience report chronicles the experience of developing an impact-focused group project module within a computer science master's programme at King's College London over two years. The module was set up in collaboration with Amazon Web Services to match student teams with public sector challenges requiring innovative technological solutions. An iterative process of modifications based on partner and student feedback aimed to enhance the learning experience and outcomes. Key benefits included providing authentic professional development for students, enabling innovation and entrepreneurship, building partnerships between academia and the public sector, and embedding responsible innovation into projects. However, challenges emerged around managing expectations, ensuring consistent partner engagement, providing support for spin-outs, and handling sensitive data issues. As more projects involved artificial intelligence applications in the second year, developing mechanisms to ethically provide access while protecting sensitive information was an increasingly crucial need. Moreover, understanding the value and impact of this model of software engineering project module requires additional research support. Overall, this collaborative module offers a promising model to deliver impact-driven solutions through coordinating academia, industry, and public sector partners. Further research can help optimise such partnerships for societal impact.

A degenerate symbol over an alphabet Σ is a non-empty subset of Σ, and a sequence of such symbols is a degenerate string. We investigate the exact computation of maximal degenerate palindromes with gaps and mismatches. We present an algorithm which, given a degenerate string of length n and natural number parameters g and m, efficiently detects exact maximal palindromes with a gap size ≤g, and ≤m permitted mismatches. We show that it can be done in O(k|Σ|(k+log⁡|Σ|)+(k+g+m)n) time and O((g+m)n) space, where k represents an upper bound on the number of degenerate symbols contained in the string. Furthermore, we also show that the problem of factorisation a string into maximal degenerate palindromes with gaps and mismatches can also be done in O(k|Σ|(k+log⁡|Σ|)+(k+g+m)n) time and O((g+m)n) space. An inverted repeat is a specific type of palindrome which refers to a nucleotide sequence followed by its reverse complement. Our results can also be used to find maximal inverted repeated sequences with gaps and mismatches, where changing the structure of palindromes to inverted repeats does not affect the overall running time. Finally we demonstrate our algorithm on several strains of SARS-CoV-2, and quantify the number of inverted repeats found with ≤0,1,2 mismatches and ≤0,10,100 gap size.

Dialogical generalisations of formal logic-based argumentation are typically restricted to a limited set of locutions e.g., assert, why, claim or prefer. However, the use of enthymemes (i.e., arguments with incomplete logical structure) warrant extending this set of locutions. This paper formalises the use of additional novel locutions that account for the use of enthymemes and are typical of real world dialogues. We thus close the gap between formal logic-based models of dialogue and the kinds of dialogue studied by the informal logic community, which focus on more human-oriented models of dialogue. This is important if formal models of dialogues are to provide normative support for human-human debate, as well as for enabling computational and human agents to jointly reason via dialogue.

First-order temporal logics are notorious for their bad computational behavior. It is known that even the two-variable monadic fragment is highly undecidable over various linear timelines, and over branching time even one-variable fragments might be undecidable. However, there have been several attempts at finding well-behaved fragments of first-order temporal logics and related temporal description logics, mostly either by restricting the available quantifier patterns or by considering sub-Boolean languages. Here we analyze seemingly “mild” extensions of decidable one-variable fragments with counting capabilities, interpreted in models with constant, decreasing, and expanding first-order domains. We show that over most classes of linear orders, these logics are (sometimes highly) undecidable, even without constant and function symbols, and with the sole temporal operator “eventually.” We establish connections with bimodal logics over 2D product structures having linear and “difference” (inequality) component relations and prove our results in this bimodal setting. We show a general result saying that satisfiability over many classes of bimodal models with commuting “unbounded” linear and difference relations is undecidable. As a byproduct, we also obtain new examples of finitely axiomatizable but Kripke incomplete bimodal logics. Our results generalize similar lower bounds on bimodal logics over products of two linear relations, and our proof methods are quite different from the known proofs of these results. Unlike previous proofs that first “diagonally encode” an infinite grid and then use reductions of tiling or Turing machine problems, here we make direct use of the grid-like structure of product frames and obtain lower-complexity bounds by reductions of counter (Minsky) machine problems. Representing counter machine runs apparently requires less control over neighboring grid points than tilings or Turing machine runs, and so this technique is possibly more versatile, even if one component of the underlying product structures is “close to” being the universal relation.

First-order temporal logics are notorious for their bad computational behaviour. It is known that even the two-variable monadic fragment is highly undecidable over various timelines. However, following the introduction of the monodic formulas (where temporal operators can be applied only to subformulas with at most one free variable), there has been a renewed interest in understanding extensions of the one-variable fragment and identifying those that are decidable. Here we analyse the one-variable fragment of temporal logic extended with counting (to two), interpreted in models with constant, decreasing, and expanding first-order domains. We show that over most classes of linear orders these logics are (sometimes highly) undecidable, even without constant and function symbols, and with the sole temporal operator 'eventually'. A more general result says that the bimodal logic of commuting linear and pseudo-equivalence relations is undecidable. The proofs are by reductions of various counter machine problems.