PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Katarina Britz

Also known as Arina Britz

Katarina Britz, who is also known as Arina Britz, is a South African researcher in logic-based AI whose work extends description logics with defeasible, non-monotonic reasoning. A PhD graduate of the University of Cape Town, she worked for eight years as Principal Researcher at the CSIR Meraka Institute and held academic positions in the School of Computing at the University of South Africa before 2015. With Ivan Varzinczak she published work on defeasible modalities and contextual rational closure in 2018 and 2019, and in 2019 and 2020 she and five coauthors, among them Giovanni Casini and Thomas Meyer, wrote a study of the formal foundations of KLM-style defeasible description logics. She sat on the program committees of KR 2020 and KR 2021 and chaired a track at SACAIR 2022. Since 2015, she is the Stellenbosch University representative of the CSIR Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), in a position at Associate Professor level in the Department of Information Science.

Timeline

  1. By 2015

    Principal Researcher at Meraka

    Before 2015, she works for eight years as Principal Researcher at the CSIR Meraka Institute, a research unit of the CSIR, and holds a number of academic positions in the School of Computing at the University of South Africa. She holds a PhD from the University of Cape Town.

  2. 2017–2019

    Defeasible modalities with Varzinczak

    With Ivan Varzinczak, she presents "Towards defeasible SROIQ" in 2017, a decidable extension of the description logic SROIQ that supports defeasible reasoning in the KLM tradition and adds defeasible roles. Their 2018 paper "From KLM-Style Conditionals to Defeasible Modalities, and Back" introduces modal operators for defeasible necessity and distinct possibility, and their 2019 paper "Contextual rational closure for defeasible ALC" relativises defeasible subsumption to contexts described by roles.

  3. 2019–2020

    KLM-style defeasible description logics

    In April 2019, she and five coauthors, Giovanni Casini, Thomas Meyer, Kody Moodley, Uli Sattler and Ivan Varzinczak, post "Theoretical Foundations of Defeasible Description Logics" to arXiv. It extends description logics with non-monotonic reasoning and gives an algorithm for the rational closure of a defeasible ontology that stays within the complexity of the classical description logic ALC. The group's "Principles of KLM-style Defeasible Description Logics" appears in Transactions on Computational Logic in 2020 as a study of the formal foundations of preferential defeasible reasoning for description logics.

  4. 2020–2021

    Program committees at KR

    She serves on the program committee of the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) in 2020 and in 2021, with CAIR at Stellenbosch University as her affiliation.

  5. 2022

    Track chair at SACAIR 2022

    In 2022, she is a track chair for the Algorithmic, data-driven and symbolic AI track at SACAIR 2022, the third Southern African Conference for Artificial Intelligence Research, which the SACAIR Steering Committee hosts as an affiliate of CAIR.

  6. Since 2015

    CAIR representative at Stellenbosch

    A position at Associate Professor level in the Department of Information Science, established in 2015, makes her the Stellenbosch University representative of the CSIR Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), a national research venture of the CSIR with a number of universities. Her research focuses on the formal modelling of reasoning with uncertainty in logics for artificial intelligence.

Career

  1. Since 2015Council for Scientific and Industrial ResearchPrincipal Researcher
  2. Since 2015Stellenbosch UniversityAssociate Professor

Education

  1. University of Cape TownPhD

From the biography.

  1. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Stellenbosch University. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Stellenbosch University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Staff | Stellenbosch University - Postgraduate programmes in Knowledge and Information Systems Management web.archive.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Arina Britz | CAIR cair.org.za. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. [1904.07559] Theoretical Foundations of Defeasible Description Logics arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. KR 2020 - Organization kr2020.inf.unibz.it. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. KR 2021 - Organization kr.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. SACAIR Online Proceedings – SACAIR2025 2025.sacair.org.za. Checked 21 October 2026.