Black Boxes

Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, University of Amsterdam

About the speaker: Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci is professor of law & economics and holds appointments both at the faculty of law and at the faculty of economics (by courtesy) of the University of Amsterdam. He is director of the Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics, fellow of the Tinbergen Institute, and editor of the International Review of Law & Economics. He has published numerous articles on the law and economics of torts, property, litigation, and lawmaking in various journals including the University of Chicago Law Review, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, the Journal of Law & Economics, and the Journal of Economic History. His recent scholarship focuses on law, economics and history and examines the evolution of legal institutions from ancient Rome to modern times. His current research projects include the economic analysis of ancient law, comparative variation of legal rules, and the economics of endogenous institutional change.

Rational interaction through preplay negotiations in non-cooperative games

Valentin Goranko, Technical University of Denmark

About the speaker: Valentin Goranko is Associate Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. His research interests are mainly focused on theory and applications of logic to computer science and artificial intelligence.

Logic of Belief vs Subjective Probability: A Normative Clash?

Hannes Leitgeb, Ludwig Maximilians University

About the speaker: Hannes Leitgeb is a professor of Logic and Philosophy of Language at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and founder of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation). His research interests are in logic (theories of truth and modality, paradox, conditionals, nonmonotonic reasoning, dynamic doxastic logic), epistemology (belief, inference, belief revision, foundations of probability, Bayesianism), philosophy of mathematics (structuralism, informal provability, abstraction, criteria of identity), philosophy of language (indeterminacy of translation, compositionality), cognitive science (symbolic representation and neural networks, metacognition), philosophy of science (empirical content, measurement theory), and history of philosophy (Logical Positivism, Carnap, Quine). He is very much in favour of Mathematical or Formal Philosophy, i.e., the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy.

Argumentation: Reasoning in a Context of Disagreement

Beishui Liao, Zhejiang University

About the speaker: Beishui Liao is an associate professor of logic and artificial intelligence at Zhejiang University. His research interest includes nonmonotonic logic (argumentation, defeasible logic), knowledge representation & reasoning, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. His work has been published in some leading journals, such as Artificial Intelligence, Information Sciences, Journal of Logic and Computation, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, etc.

Abstract: This talk focuses on (formal) argumentation, an alternative nonmonotonic formalism. In order to treat with the uncertainty, incompleteness, and inconsistency of information, a number of research efforts have been made in the area of nonmonotonic reasoning. In 1980s, three nonmonotonic formalisms (including default logic, circumscription and autoepistemic logic) were proposed. However, these formalisms are mainly suitable to epistemic reasoning. For practical reasoning and the reasoning in the process of multi-agent interaction, a more general and natural nonmonotonic formalism is needed. Meanwhile, from the perspective of implementation, the problem of computational complexity and that of the dynamics of systems are challenging. In this talk, after presenting some basic notions of argumentation, I will introduce an idea of "local computation" and three efficient approaches based on it.

Reason-based rationalisation

Christian List, London School of Economics

About the speaker: Christian List is a professor of Political Science and Philosophy at London School of Economics. He is now a joint member of the Government and Philosophy Departments at the London School of Economics. He works in social choice theory, political philosophy, formal epistemology, the philosophy of social science, and more recently the philosophy of mind. He has made contributions to areas such as judgment aggregation, deliberative democracy group agency, and individual decision theory. Some of his current research focuses on theories of individual agency and free will. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he held research or visiting positions at Oxford, the Australian National University, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Konstanz, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. He is currently one of the editors of Economics and Philosophy and an associate editor of Episteme.

His talk is based on joint work with Franz Dietrich. The paper is available at: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/PDF-files/ProgressRationalization.pdf

The Epistemic Potential of Groups

Sonja Smets, University of Amsterdam

About the speaker: Sonja Smets is an associate professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests cover: Logic (in particular non-classical logics, including non-monotonic logics, belief revision, modal and temporal logic, quantum logic); Knowledge Representation in AI; Multi-agent Systems; Formal Epistemology; Philosophy of Quantum Physics, Quantum Information and Computation, Rationality and the role of "belief" in solution concepts in Games, the connection between logics for belief revision and Formal Learning Theory.

Abstract: In this presentation I focus on the ‘epistemic potential' of a group of agents, i.e. the knowledge (or beliefs) that the group may come to possess if all its members join their forces and share their individual information. Among the different notions of group knowledge studied in the literature, which one can give us a good measure of a group's epistemic potential? A first candidate is `distributed knowledge', which can in principle be converted into actual individual knowledge by means of simple inter-agent communication. However in practice there are many factors which may prevent the full actualization of distributed knowledge. These factors include the group's dynamics, the structure of the social network, the individuals' different epistemic interests and agendas, etc.  When we take these realistic conditions into account, a more accurate formalization of a group's potential knowledge can be developed. I show that in scenarios allowing inter-agent communication as the group's main knowledge-aggregation method, the group's true epistemic potential may well turn out to be very different from both distributed knowledge and from common knowledge (lying instead somewhere in between these extremes). The results reported on in this lecture are based on on-going joint work with A. Baltag and R. Boddy.

Representing and Reasoning about Game Strategies

Dongmo Zhang, University of Western Sydney

About the speaker: Dongmo Zhang is an associate professor at the University of Western Sydney. His research interests include belief revision, reasoning about action, bargaining theory, e-trading and multiagent systems.

Abstract: As a contribution to the challenge of building game-playing AI systems, we develop logical framework for representing and reasoning about strategies. The language of our formalism builds on the existing general Game Description Language (GDL) and extends it by a standard modality for linear time along with two dual connectives to express preferences when combining strategies. The semantics of the language is provided by a standard state-transition model. As such, problems that require reasoning about games can be solved by the standard methods for reasoning about actions and change. We also endow the language with a specific semantics by which strategy formulas are understood as move recommendations for a player. To illustrate how our formalism supports automated reasoning about strategies, we demonstrate two example methods of implementation: first, we formalise the semantic interpretation of our language in conjunction with game rules and strategy rules in the Situation Calculus; second, we show how the reasoning problem can be solved with Answer Set Programming.

This is joint work with Prof Michael Thielscher.