Member of executive committee ERCIM representing Luxembourg, member of faculty council, head of ILIAS.
Latest news:
- Tutorial on "An advanced treatment of five problems of deontic logic and normative reasoning in computer science
" at ESSLLI11
- Workshop on "Logics in security" at ESSLLI10
- Tutorial on "Ten problems of deontic logic and normative reasoning in computer science" at ESSLLI10
- Workshop on normchange, January 18+19, Amsterdam
- Workshop on security, January 11+12, Luxembourg
- NORMAS 2010 will be part of AISB 2010
- Tutorial on "Normative Multiagent Systems" at EASSS09
- Tutorial on "A Practical Tutorial on Normative Reasoning" at Spring School 2009 of COST Action IC0702:
Reasoning and Decision Making
under Uncertainty and Imprecision.
- Invited lecture at LORI 2009
- Invited lecture at MFI 2009
- A symposium on "Social Networks and Multi-Agent Systems" at AISB'09 in April 2009
- We organize the fourth normative multiagent systems workshop as a Schloss Dagstuhl seminar, 15-20 March 2009
- European summer School on Logic, Language and Information ESSLLI08: introductory course on deontic logic in computer science by Hansen and van der Torre. reader handout 1 1h 2a 2b 3a 3b 3e 4 5
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Special issue of Journal on Autonomous and Multiagent Systems, 17:1, 2008, on normative multiagent systems
- We organize the ninth conference on deontic logic in computer science and the third workshop on normative multiagent systems in July 2008 in Luxembourg.
- European Agent Summer School EASSS08: introductory course on normative multiagent systems by G. Boella, D. Grossi and L. van der Torre slides
- Out of 1?? submissions and 22 accepted papers for PRIMA07, the paper "Reasoning about norms, obligations, time and agents" by J. Broersen and L. van der Torre was honored with the best paper award.
- We organized a seminar on "formal models of norm change" in November 2007 in Luxembourg.
- Out of 464 submissions and 110 accepted papers for KES-AMSTA07, the paper "Power in Norm Negotiation" by G. Boella and L. van der Torre was honored with the best paper award.
- May 2nd, 2007, inaugural speech "Violation games: a new approach of handling norms in intelligent systems"
(the movie)
- DROPS proceedings of Dagstuhl Workshop on Normative Multi-Agent Systems, March 2007.
- October, 2006, Special issue of Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory on normative multi-agent systems.
Knowledge representation is an issue that arises in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In cognitive science it is concerned with how people store and process information. In artificial intelligence the primary aim is to store knowledge so that programs can process it and achieve the verisimilitude of human intelligence. AI researchers have borrowed representation theories from cognitive science. Thus there are representation techniques such as frames, rules and semantic networks which have originated from theories of human information processing. Since knowledge is used to achieve intelligent behavior, the fundamental goal of knowledge representation is to represent knowledge in a manner as to facilitate inferencing i.e. drawing conclusions from knowledge.
We work on logics for knowledge representation and reasoning. Input-output logic (IOL) is a theory of input/output operations resembling inference, but where input propositions are not in general included among outputs, and the operation is not in any way reversible. Examples arise in contexts of conditional obligations, goals, ideals, preferences, actions, and beliefs. Four are singled out: simple-minded, basic (making intelligent use of disjunctive inputs), simple-minded reusable (in which outputs may be recycled as inputs), and basic reusable. They are defined semantically and characterised by derivation rules, as well as in terms of relabeling procedures and modal operators. Their behaviour is studied on both semantic and syntactic levels.
A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of several agents, collectively capable of reaching goals that are difficult to achieve by an individual agent or monolithic system. The exact nature of the agents is a matter of some controversy. They are sometimes claimed to be autonomous. For example a household floor cleaning robot can be autonomous in that it is dependent only on a human operator to start it up. On the other hand, in practice, all agents are under active human supervision. Furthermore, the more important the activities of the agent are to humans, the more supervision that they receive. In fact, autonomy is seldom desired. Instead interdependent systems are needed. MAS can be claimed to include human agents as well. Human organizations and society in general can be considered an example of a multi-agent system.
We work on normative multi-agent systems, which study general and domain independent properties of norms. It builds on results obtained in deontic logic, the logic of obligations and permissions, for the representation of norms as rules, the application of such rules, contrary-to-duty reasoning and the relation to permissions. However, it goes beyond logical relations among obligations and permissions by explaining the relation among social norms and obligations, relating regulative norms to constitutive norms, explaining the evolution of normative systems, and much more.
Our normative multi-agent systems are based on the BOID architecture, an abstract agent representation, that consists of the four components Beliefs, Obligations, Intentions and Desires. The simple-minded BOID is a lightweight stimulus response agent, that only exhibits reactive behavior. Our BOID consists of two phases: the first phase results in an intermediate epistemic state, and the second phase results in new intended actions. This simple-minded BOID is extended (as time and resources allow) with capabilities for deliberation which may result in more complex (e.g. pro-active) behavior.
