Varol Akman is professor of Computer Engineering and chairperson of the Philosophy Department at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Prior to joining Bilkent, he held a senior researcher position with Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (1986–1988), and a visiting position with Universiteit Utrecht (1985–1986), both in the Netherlands. During the period 1980–1985, Akman was a Fulbright scholar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, where he received a PhD degree in computer and systems engineering.
Akman's research is concentrated in theoretical areas of artificial intelligence and philosophy, especially logical foundations of AI, commonsense reasoning, and pragmatics. In general, he tries to adhere to the following observation of John McCarthy: "AI cannot avoid philosophy. If a computer program is to behave intelligently in the real world, then it must be provided with some kind of framework into which to fit particular facts it is told or discovers. This amounts to at least a fragment of some kind of philosophy, however naive."
For his Bilkent homepage click http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~akman
For his online papers click http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~akman/papers.html
Here is a CV: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~akman/CV.doc
Here is a list of publications: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~akman/pubs-eng.doc
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