Interview with Uli Sattler
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INTERVIEW
Interview with Uli Sattler Uli Sattler1 · Thomas Schneider2 Received: 30 June 2020 / Accepted: 11 July 2020 © Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
1 About
Uli Sattler is a professor of logic-based knowledge representation at the University of Manchester. She worked as a dressmaker before studying Computer Science in Erlangen, Germany, received her PhD from RWTH Aachen, and completed her habilitation at TU Dresden. In 2003, she joined the Information Management Group at the University of Manchester.
2 Interview Uli, thank you for taking the time to give us an interview. When did you become interested in science and in computer science in particular? Was there some triggering event at school or later? There were no triggers as such, but I was very interested in crafts. As a teenager, if I had known an engineer, I would * Thomas Schneider thomas.schneider@uni‑bremen.de Uli Sattler [email protected] 1
University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
2
probably have said that I am interested in engineering. For some weird reason, I became a dressmaker instead but then got very bored by this. Then a friend of a friend recommended computer science. I knew nothing about it but soon fell in love with it. I met some really nice people and I learned about some really interesting concepts. In particular, and I remember this vividly: I met the tiling problem and how it is undecidable. That was one of the opening doors for me. I also learned a bit about logic and language theory, which I liked a lot, as well as Petri Nets, vector addition systems, and more. I was fascinated by these concepts and their relationships. But there was no: “ooh this is science—I am good at science”. You already mentioned logic. Was that also the time when you became interested in logic and in particular in description logics? Again, it was totally coincidental. The person who introduced me to the tiling problem when I was an undergraduate student was Professor Volker Strehl at the University of Erlangen. There was no formal mentoring system, so he became my informal and excellent mentor, for which I am very grateful to him. He introduced me to propositional logic and first order logic and I felt that this was “quite interesting”. In my undergraduate project, I got in touch with research a little bit, which I enjoyed a lot, and of which I wanted to do more. So Volker Strehl sent me to his international friends, and I ended up in Bordeaux working with Robert Cori, and in some other places. Later, when I graduated, I thought I should better do a PhD because this is the only way I can continue doing research. At that time, I didn’t want to stay in Erlangen, and I spoke with Volker Strehl. He was very understanding and suggested that I go and see his friend Franz Baader, who was doing some really interesting research on description logics—these were new to me at the time but they looked exciting. In 1994, I went to Aachen and Franz
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