Abstract Normative Systems

11^th December 2012, 16:00 Ashton Lecture Theatre
Prof. Leon van der Torre
Individual and Collective Reasoning Group
University of Luxembourg

Abstract

Abstract normative systems can be visualized as labeled graphs and allow to reason with norms even when their content is not detailed. We first give a general introduction to the area of normative reasoning based on the recent handbook of deontic logic and normative systems. Then we introduce our abstract theory of normative reasoning, presenting various semantics and their proof systems. We make a comparison with the abstract theory of argumentation, and we give an outlook to abstraction in reasoning for agreement technologies.

This talk is based on joint research with Guido Boella (University of Turin), Silvano Colombo Tosatto (University of Luxembourg) and Serena Villata (INRIA France). Some early results have been presented at KR 2012 and DEON 2012.

Bio:
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Leon van der Torre is full professor of intelligent systems at the University of Luxembourg since 2006. He heads the Individual and Collective Reasoning (ICR) group and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Intelligent and Adaptive Systems (ILIAS), he founded the CSC robolab, and he is a staff member of the interdisciplinary center for Security, Reliability and Trust. He developed the BOID agent architecture (with colleagues from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), input/output logic (with David Makinson) and the game-theoretic approach to normative multiagent systems (with Guido Boella from University of Torino). He authored over 230 papers indexed by DBLP and 30 papers in disciplines outside computer science. He is an editor of the handbook of deontic logic and normative systems (in preparation), deontic logic corner editor of Journal of Logic and Computation, and member of editorial board of Logic Journal of the IGPL.

He is driven by the insight that intelligent systems (like humans) are characterized not only by their individual reasoning capacity, but also by their social interaction potential. His overarching goal is to develop and investigate comprehensive formal models and computational realizations of individual and collective reasoning and rationality. He is active in several strongly interrelated areas, notably normative multi-agent systems and deontic reasoning, autonomous intelligent agents and their cognitive dynamics, agreement technologies and computational social choice, and logic-based knowledge representation and non-monotonic reasoning.