Funding Agencies

Participants:

Starting date

16 May 2011

Duration

36 Months + 5 months

Description

Since humans started building the first technical artefacts, these have become part of society themselves. Nowadays artefacts largely determine the way people interact, among themselves and with the external environment. Human society is therefore a huge socio-technical system (STS). Within such huge system, special relevance have for us those subsystems which are designed, in the sense that certain artificial constraints are imposed in order to encourage specific behaviours involving people, machines, or the external reality. A hospital, a company, a city mobility system are examples of such systems.

In computer science and informatics research, the STS theory had a substantial impact on the information systems community, as well as on agent-oriented software engineering, where the need to consider people and organisations as not just users but actors has clearly emerged. By and large, however, we cannot say that the socio-technical approach is widely and effectively practised. One of the reasons is the lack of a systematic engineering approach. In other words, it is not enough to analyse and explain socio-technical factors to engineers: we need to translate generic principles into formal engineering techniques.

To address these issues, the objectives of this project is to contribute to an ontology of social reality, and to ground logical models of multiagent systems upon it. In order to offer an applicable engineering method, we will provide a small family of logics. Each logic will be dedicated to a small subset of concepts present in the ontology. This will improve their clarity and reduce the risks of high computational complexity. Each logic will also be given models of the `same kind' in order to provide reusable engineering techniques. We will take advantage of logical models of agency. The logics will be applied to STS modelling, verification of commercial- and safety-critical properties and workflow synthesis.

Output

[21] Nicolas Troquard.
A formal theory for conceptualizing artefacts and tool manipulations.
In 8th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2014). IOS Press, 2014, pages 119-132.
( .pdf )

[20] Stefano Borgo, Daniele Porello, and Nicolas Troquard.
Logical Operators for Ontological Modeling.
In 8th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2014). IOS Press, 2014, pages 23-36.
( .pdf )

[19] Daniele Porello, and Nicolas Troquard.
A resource-sensitive logic of agency.
In 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'14), Prague, Czech Republic. IOS Press, 2014, pages 723-728.
( .pdf )

[18] Emanuele Bottazzi, and Nicolas Troquard.
Help as a form of control.
Collective Intentionality IX (Collint 2014), Bloomington, IN, USA, 2014.
Informal proceedings.

[17] Daniele Porello, and Nicolas Troquard.
A logical modeling of artifacts' behaviour.
At the symposium Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science (SILFS), 2014.
Informal proceedings.

[16] Daniele Porello, and Nicolas Troquard.
Non-normal modal Linear Logic with an application to resource-sensitive agency.
In 7th Workshop on Logical Aspects of Multi-Agent Systems (LAMAS@AAMAS 2014), Paris, France.
Informal proceedings.

[15] Daniele Porello, and Nicolas Troquard.
A resource-sensitive account of the use of artifacts.
In 13th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'14), Paris, France. IFAAMAS, 2014, pages 1549-1550. (Short paper, submitted as such).
( .pdf | acm )

[14] Emanuele Bottazzi, and Nicolas Troquard.
On the philosophy and logic of help.
Chapter in the book "The cognitive foundations of group attitudes and social interaction", Springer.
( .pdf )

[12] Nicolas Troquard.
Reasoning about coalitional agency and ability in the logics of "bringing-it-about".
In Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 28(3):381-407, Springer.
doi: 10.1007/s10458-013-9229-x
( .pdf (preprint) | springer )

[11] Andreas Herzig, Tiago de Lima, Emiliano Lorini, and Nicolas Troquard.
Three traditions in the logic of action: bringing them together.
In Robert Trypuz, editor, Krister Segerberg on Logic of Actions, pages 61-84, Series: Outstanding Contributions to Logic, Vol. 1, Springer, 2014.
( .pdf | springer )

[10] Wiebe van der Hoek, Nicolas Troquard, and Michael Wooldridge.
Reasoning about Choice.
In 2nd Int. Conf. on Agreement Technologies (AT-2013), LNCS 8068, Springer, 2013.
( .pdf | springer )

[9] Philippe Balbiani, Andreas Herzig, and Nicolas Troquard.
Dynamic logic of propositional assignments: a well-behaved variant of PDL.
In 28th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2013), New Orleans, USA., pages 143-152. IEEE Computer Society, 2013.
( .pdf | ieee )

[8] Emanuele Bottazzi, and Nicolas Troquard.
A Logical and Philosophical Analysis of Helping.
5th Joint Action Meeting (JAM 2013).
Informal proceedings.

[7] Nicolas Troquard.
A simple logic of tool manipulation.
In AISB Convention 2013, Symposium the SOCIAL.PATH, Exeter, UK, pages 80-82. The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, 2013.
( .pdf )

[6] Nicolas Troquard, and Dirk Walther.
On satisfiability in ATL with strategy contexts.
In JELIA 2012, LNCS 7519.
( .pdf )

Nicolas Troquard, and Emanuele Bottazzi.
Preliminaries on the Logic of Cooperative Impulses.
Presented at Collective Intentionality VIII.
Informal proceedings.

[5] Andreas Herzig, Tiago de Lima, Emiliano Lorini, and Nicolas Troquard.
A Computationally Grounded Dynamic Logic of Agency, with an Application to Legal Actions.
In DEON 2012, LNAI 7393.
( .pdf )

[4] Nicolas Troquard, and Dirk Walther.
ATL with contexts: agency and explicit strategies.
In 5th Workshop on Logical Aspects of Multi-Agent Systems (LAMAS@AAMAS'12).
Informal proceedings.
( .pdf )

[3] Nicolas Troquard.
Coalitional Agency and Evidence-Based Ability.
In 11th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'12), Valencia, Spain. IFAAMAS, 2012, pages 1245-1246. (Short paper).
( .pdf | acm )

[2] Nicolas Troquard.
Learning and Practice of the Property Specification Language.
In IEEE Design and Test of Computers, 28(5):110-111, IEEE Computer Society Press, Sep./Oct. 2011
doi:10.1109/MDT.2011.111
( ieee )

[1] Andreas Herzig, Emiliano Lorini, and Nicolas Troquard.
A dynamic logic of institutional actions.
In 12th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA XII @IJCAI'11), Barcelona, Spain. Volume 6814 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), pages 295-311. Springer, 2011.
( .pdf | springer )