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Automatic event detection from images or wearable sensors is a fundamental step towards the development of advanced sport analytics and broadcasting software. However, the collection and annotation of large scale sport datasets is hindered by technical obstacles, cost of data acquisition and annotation, and commercial interests. In this paper, we present the Soccer Event Recognition (SoccER) data generator, which builds upon an existing, high quality open source game engine to enable synthetic data generation. The software generates detailed spatio-temporal data from simulated soccer games, along with fine-grained, automatically generated event ground truth. The SoccER software suite includes also a complete event detection system entirely developed and tested on a synthetic dataset including 500 min of game, and more than 1 million events. We close the paper by discussing avenues for future research in sports event recognition enabled by the use of synthetic data.

Decision trees are simple, yet powerful, classification models used to classify categorical and numerical data, and, despite their simplicity, they are commonly used in operations research and management, as well as in knowledge mining. From a logical point of view, a decision tree can be seen as a structured set of logical rules written in propositional logic. Since knowledge mining is rapidly evolving towards temporal knowledge mining, and since in many cases temporal information is best described by interval temporal logics, propositional logic decision trees may evolve towards interval temporal logic decision trees. In this paper, we define the problem of interval temporal logic decision tree learning, and propose a solution that generalizes classical decision tree learning.

Interval temporal logics provide a natural framework for temporal reasoning about interval structures over linearly ordered domains, where intervals are taken as first-class citizens. Their expressive power and computational behavior mainly depend on two parameters: the set of modalities they feature and the linear orders over which they are interpreted. In this paper, we consider all fragments of Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic HS with a decidable satisfiability problem over the rationals, and we provide a complete classification of them in terms of their expressiveness and computational complexity by solving the last few open problems.

Model checking allows one to automatically verify a specification of the expected properties of a system against a formal model of its behavior (generally, a Kripke structure). Point-based temporal logics, such as LTL, CTL, and CTL⁎, that describe how the system evolves state-by-state, are commonly used as specification languages. They proved themselves quite successful in a variety of application domains. However, properties constraining the temporal ordering of temporally extended events as well as properties involving temporal aggregations, which are inherently interval-based, can not be properly dealt with by them. Interval temporal logics (ITLs), that take intervals as their primitive temporal entities, turn out to be well-suited for the specification and verification of interval properties of computations (we interpret all the tracks of a Kripke structure as computation intervals). In this paper, we study the model checking problem for some fragments of Halpern and Shoham's modal logic of time intervals (HS). HS features one modality for each possible ordering relation between pairs of intervals (the so-called Allen's relations). First, we describe an EXPSPACE model checking algorithm for the HS fragment of Allen's relations meets, met-by, starts, started-by, and finishes, which exploits the possibility of finding, for each track (of unbounded length), an equivalent bounded-length track representative. While checking a property, it only needs to consider tracks whose length does not exceed the given bound. Then, we prove the model checking problem for such a fragment to be PSPACE-hard. Finally, we identify other well-behaved HS fragments which are expressive enough to capture meaningful interval properties of systems, such as mutual exclusion, state reachability, and non-starvation, and whose computational complexity is less than or equal to that of LTL.

Model checking is a powerful method widely explored in formal verification. Given a model of a system, e.g., a Kripke structure, and a formula specifying its expected behaviour, one can verify whether the system meets the behaviour by checking the formula against the model. Classically, system behaviour is expressed by a formula of a temporal logic, such as LTL and the like. These logics are "point-wise" interpreted, as they describe how the system evolves state-by-state. However, there are relevant properties, such as those constraining the temporal relations between pairs of temporally extended events or involving temporal aggregations, which are inherently "interval-based", and thus asking for an interval temporal logic. In this paper, we give a formalization of the model checking problem in an interval logic setting. First, we provide an interpretation of formulas of Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic HS over finite Kripke structures, which allows one to check interval properties of computations. Then, we prove that the model checking problem for HS against finite Kripke structures is decidable by a suitable small model theorem, and we provide a lower bound to its computational complexity., In Journal: Acta Informatica, Springer Berlin Heidelber, 2015

In recent years, model checking with interval temporal logics is emerging as a viable alternative to model checking with standard point-based temporal logics, such as LTL, CTL, CTL∗, and the like. The behavior of the system is modeled by means of (finite) Kripke structures, as usual. However, while temporal logics which are interpreted “point-wise” describe how the system evolves state-by-state, and predicate properties of system states, those which are interpreted “interval-wise” express properties of computation stretches, spanning a sequence of states. A proposition letter is assumed to hold over a computation stretch (interval) if and only if it holds over each component state (homogeneity assumption). A natural question arises: is there any advantage in replacing points by intervals as the primary temporal entities, or is it just a matter of taste? In this article, we study the expressiveness of Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic (HS) in model checking, in comparison with those of LTL, CTL, and CTL∗. To this end, we consider three semantic variants of HS: the state-based one, introduced by Montanari et al. in [30, 34], that allows time to branch both in the past and in the future, the computation-tree-based one, that allows time to branch in the future only, and the trace-based variant, that disallows time to branch. These variants are compared among themselves and to the aforementioned standard logics, getting a complete picture. In particular, we show that HS with trace-based semantics is equivalent to LTL (but at least exponentially more succinct), HS with computation-tree-based semantics is equivalent to finitary CTL∗, and HS with state-based semantics is incomparable with all of them (LTL, CTL, and CTL∗). © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

The problem of temporal dataset evaluation consists in establishing to what extent a set of temporal data (histories) complies with a given temporal condition. It presents a strong resemblance with the problem of model checking enhanced with the ability of rating the compliance degree of a model against a formula. In this paper, we solve the temporal dataset evaluation problem by suitably combining the outcomes of model checking an interval temporal logic formula against sets of histories (finite interval models), possibly taking into account domain-dependent measures/criteria, like, for instance, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. From a technical point of view, the main contribution of the paper is a (deterministic) polynomial time algorithm for interval temporal logic model checking over finite interval models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a (truly) interval temporal logic model checking in the area of temporal databases and data mining rather than in the formal verification setting.

International audience; We introduce a modal logic, called Cone Logic, whose formulas describe properties of points in the plane and spatial relationships between them. Points are labelled by proposition letters and spatial relations are induced by the four cone-shaped cardinal directions. Cone Logic can be seen as a weakening of Venema's Compass Logic. We prove that, unlike Compass Logic and other projection-based spatial logics, its satisfiability problem is decidable (precisely, PSPACE-complete). We also show that it is expressive enough to capture meaningful interval temporal logics - in particular, the interval temporal logic of Allen's relations `Begins', `During', and `Later', and their transposes.

The chop operator C is a binary modality that plays an important role in interval temporal logics. Such an operator, which is not definable in Halpern and Shoham's modal logic of time intervals HS, allows one to split an interval into two parts and to specify what is true over them. C appears both in Moszkowski's PITL (that pairs it with a modal constant Pi which is true on all and only the intervals with coincident endpoints) and in Venema's CDT (that also features the binary modalities D and T, and Pi). Without the so-called locality principle, which restricts the semantics of proposition letters, the satisfiability problem for both PITL and CDT turns out to be undecidable over all meaningful classes of linear orders. The problem has been shown to be undecidable also for the fragment C, that is, PITL without Pi, over infinite linear orders. In this paper, we prove that the same holds for C over finite linear orders. To this end, we exploit the close relation between C and the reflexive version of the HS fragment BE, whose modalities correspond to Allen's relations starts and finishes: we prove that the satisfiability problem for reflexive BE is undecidable, undecidability of the same problem for C comes as a corollary.

Interval temporal logics provide a natural framework for temporal reasoning about interval structures over linearly ordered domains, where intervals are taken as the primitive ontological entities. Their computational behaviour and expressive power mainly depend on two parameters: the set of modalities they feature and the linear orders over which they are interpreted. In this paper, we consider all fragments of Halpern and Shoham’s interval temporal logic HS with a decidable satisfiability problem over the class of all dense linear orders, and we provide a complete classification of them in terms of their complexity and expressiveness by solving the last two open cases.