LPaaS as Micro-Intelligence: Enhancing IoT with Symbolic Reasoning

In the era of Big Data and IoT, successful systems have to be designed to discover, store, process, learn, analyse, and predict from a massive amount of data—in short, they have to behave intelligently. Despite the success of non-symbolic techniques such as deep learning, symbolic approaches to machine intelligence still have a role to play in order to achieve key properties such as observability, explainability, and accountability. In this paper we focus on logic programming (LP), and advocate its role as a provider of symbolic reasoning capabilities in IoT scenarios, suitably complementing non-symbolic ones. In particular, we show how its re-interpretation in terms of LPaaS (Logic Programming as a Service) can work as an enabling technology for distributed situated intelligence. A possible example of hybrid reasoning—where symbolic and non-symbolic techniques fruitfully combine to produce intelligent behaviour—is presented, demonstrating how LPaaS could work in a smart energy grid scenario.