Related papers: A formal system for reasoning about assertibility,…
This paper proposes a formal framework for modeling the interaction of causal and (qualitative) epistemic reasoning. To this purpose, we extend the notion of a causal model with a representation of the epistemic state of an agent. On the…
Modern data systems must support accountability across persistent legal, political, and analytic disagreement. This requirement imposes strict constraints on the design of any ontology intended to function as a shared substrate. We…
We show that including degrees of a particular kind of provability in the search target for any theorem-prover in sufficiently powerful formal systems over finite-sized statements preserves well-definition and a sufficient consistency while…
A formal theory of experimentation will be presented. Such a theory presents the necessary & sufficient conditions a world must satisfy in order to admit the use of the scientific method.
Social norms are powerful formalism in coordinating autonomous agents' behaviour to achieve certain objectives. In this paper, we propose a dynamic normative system to enable the reasoning of the changes of norms under different…
Correctness is a necessary condition for systems to be effective in meeting human demands, thus playing a critical role in system development. However, correctness often manifests as a nebulous concept in practice, leading to challenges in…
This paper presents a formal theory of verification and validation (V&V) within systems engineering, grounded in the axiom that V&V are fundamentally knowledge-building activities. Using dynamic epistemic modal logic, we develop precise…
Argumentation is the process of constructing arguments about propositions, and the assignment of statements of confidence to those propositions based on the nature and relative strength of their supporting arguments. The process is modelled…
Transparency is a fundamental requirement for decision making systems when these should be deployed in the real world. It is usually achieved by providing explanations of the system's behavior. A prominent and intuitive type of explanations…
This thesis concerns the development of a framework that facilitates the design and analysis of formal systems. Specifically, this framework provides a specification language which supports the concise and direct description of formal…
This paper combines two studies: a topological semantics for epistemic notions and abstract argumentation theory. In our combined setting, we use a topological semantics to represent the structure of an agent's collection of evidence, and…
We present a risk-aware formalism for evaluating system trajectories in the presence of uncertain interactions between the system and its environment. The proposed formalism supports reasoning under uncertainty and systematically handles…
Explainable systems expose information about why certain observed effects are happening to the agents interacting with them. We argue that this constitutes a positive flow of information that needs to be specified, verified, and balanced…
Argumentation is a very active research field of Artificial Intelligence concerned with the representation and evaluation of arguments used in dialogues between humans and/or artificial agents. Acceptability semantics of formal…
A model of knowledge representation is described in which propositional facts and the relationships among them can be supported by other facts. The set of knowledge which can be supported is called the set of cognitive units, each having…
Specifying the intended behaviour of autonomous systems is becoming increasingly important but is fraught with many challenges. This technical report provides an overview of existing work on specifications of autonomous systems and places a…
A formal but intuitive framework is introduced to bridge the gap between data obtained from empirical studies and that generated by agent-based models. This is based on three key tenets. Firstly, a simulation can be given multiple formal…
We introduce the problem of temporal coverability for realizability and synthesis. Namely, given a language of words that must be covered by a produced system, how to automatically produce such a system. We consider the case of coverability…
We study the problem of automatic fact-checking, paying special attention to the impact of contextual and discourse information. We address two related tasks: (i) detecting check-worthy claims, and (ii) fact-checking claims. We develop…
Recently, symbolic structures were proposed as finite representations of potentially infinite first-order structures, where Linear Integer Arithmetic terms and formulas define the domain and interpretations of a structure. We generalize…