Program

This is joint work with Tim French, University of Western Australia. We propose various logical semantics for change of awareness. The setting is that of multiple agents that may become aware of facts or other agents, or forget about them. We model these dynamics by quantifying over propositional variables and agent variables, in a multi-agent epistemic language with awareness operators, employing a notion of bisimulation with a clause for 'same awareness'. The quantification is over all different ways in which an agent can become aware (or forget). Logics for change of awareness combine well with logics for informational change, as when a public announcement simultaneously makes you aware of an issue ('a plane just crashed on Schiphol Airport' - a news item at a previous presentation about this topic! Let's hope I have not to update it just before Chongqing).

Argumentation is a form of reasoning that makes explicit the reasons for the conclusions that are drawn and how conflicts between reasons are resolved. This provides a natural mechanism, for example, to handle inconsistent and uncertain information and to resolve conflicts of opinion between intelligent agents. In consequence, argumentation has become a key topic in the logical study of commonsense reasoning and in the dialogical study of inter-agent communication.

In this talk an introduction will be given to current research in AI on logics and dialogue systems for argumentation. If time permits, some current research issues will be discussed, such as semantics for argumentation-based inference and properties of interaction protocols for argumentation.