The Approximate and Qualitative Reasoning (AQR) Group is part of the Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications within the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. The School has earned top ratings for both research (5*A) and teaching (Excellent) in the most recent UK national quality assessment, and is the premier research centre for AI in Europe. In particular, Edinburgh was the only University in the UK awarded the top 5*A rating in Computer Science in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise.

The members of the AQR group are particularly active in the areas of fuzzy and qualitative modelling, model-based reasoning and knowledge reuse. The following are the strands of our current research:

Computational learning mechanisms for domain modelling, with a focus on explicit knowledge formulation and refinement.
Constraint satisfaction techniques for problems which involve dynamic, uncertain and/or flexible constraints.
Integrated knowledge models, combining fuzzy, qualitative and graphical representations to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of practical reasoning systems.

On the whole, these strands of research concern the development of techniques for representing the common-sense knowledge of the average person and the tacit knowledge used by engineers and scientists. This allows the subjective element of common-sense knowledge to be incorporated within formal and domain-independent algorithms to perform reasoning about domain-specific problems.

Most of our research projects are/were funded by EPSRC and industrial partners.