Call for Papers: DEON 2012

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 27 February 2012 and full paper submission deadline of 5 March 2012 — has been issued for DEON 2012: The 11th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, to be held 16-18 June 2012, at the University of Bergen, in Bergen, Norway.

Papers are invited on general topics, and on the “special theme” of “Deontic Logic and Social Choice.” The general topics are:

• the logical study of normative reasoning, including formal systems of deontic logic, defeasible normative reasoning, logics of action, logics of time, and other related areas of logic;
• the formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems;
• the formal specification of aspects of norm-governed multi-agent systems and autonomous agents, including (but not limited to) the representation of rights, authorization, delegation, power, responsibility and liability;
• normative aspects of protocols for communication, negotiation and multi-agent decision making;
• the formal representation of legal knowledge;
• the formal specification of normative systems for the management of bureaucratic processes in public or private administration;
• applications of normative logic to the specification of database integrity constraints.

The special theme topics are:

• Normative system selection and optimization
• Merging and aggregation of norms
• Compliance and enforcement strategies for norms
• Game theoretic aspects of deontic reasoning
• Norms, culture and and shared values
• Violation detection and norm creation mechanisms
• Simulation of dynamics in normative systems
• Emergence of norms
• Norm change

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT IAAIL.

Prakken on Reconstructing Popov v. Hayashi in a Framework for Argumentation with Structured Arguments and Dungean Semantics

Professor Dr. Henry Prakken of the University of Groningen Faculty of Law has posted Reconstructing Popov v. Hayashi in a Framework for Argumentation with Structured Arguments and Dungean Semantics, forthcoming in Knowledge Engineering Review. Here is the abstract:

In this article the argumentation structure of the court’s decision in the Popov v. Hayashi case is formalised in Prakken’s (2010) abstract framework for argument-based inference with structured arguments. In this framework, arguments are inference trees formed by applying two kinds of inference rules, strict and defeasible rules. Arguments can be attacked in three ways: attacking a premise, attacking a conclusion and attacking an inference. To resolve such conflicts, preferences may be used, which leads to three corresponding kinds of defeat, after which Dung’s (1995) abstract acceptability semantics can be used to evaluate the arguments. In the present paper the abstract framework is instantiated with strict inference rules corresponding to first-order logic and with defeasible inference rules for defeasible modus ponens and various argument schemes. The main techniques used in the formal reconstruction of the case are rule-exception structures and arguments about rule validity. Arguments about socio-legal values and the use of precedent cases are reduced to arguments about rule validity. The tree structure of arguments, with explicit subargument relations between arguments, is used to capture the dependency relations between the elements of the court’s decision.

Call for Papers: GandALF 2010: International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, & Formal Verification

A call for papers, with abstract submission deadline of 21 March 2010 and paper submission deadline of 28 March 2010, has been issued for GandALF 2010: The First International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification, to be held 17-18 June 2010 in Minori, Italy.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Automata Theory
• Automated Deduction
• Logical aspects of Computational Complexity
• Concurrency and Distributed computation
• Decision Procedures
• Deductive, Compositional, and Abstraction Techniques for Verification
• Finite Model Theory
• First-order and Higher-order Logics
• Formal Languages
• Formal Methods for Complex Systems (Interactive Systems, Systems Biology,…)
• Games and Automata for Verification
• Game Semantics
• Game Theory
• Hybrid, Embedded, and Mobile Systems Verification
• Logics of Programs
• Modal and Temporal Logics
• Model Checking
• Models of Reactive and Real-Time Systems
• Program Analysis and Software Verification
• Specification and Verification of Finite and Infinite-state Systems
• Synthesis and Execution”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dario Della Monica.

Call for Papers: NMR 2010 & Subworkshops on Preferences & Norm and on Argument, Dialog & Decision

[NOTE: As of 2 February 2010, the submission deadline for the Subworkshop on Preferences & Norm has been extended to 15 February 2010, per Frederic Koriche.]

Calls for papers, all of which have submissions deadlines of 29 January 2010 [but see extended deadline noted above], have been issued for NMR 2010: The 13th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, and particularly its Subworkshop on Preferences & Norm and its Subworkshop on Argument, Dialog & Decision. Both events will be held 14-16 May 2010, at Sutton Place, Toronto, Canada.

For the Subworkshop on Preferences & Norm, papers are invited on the following topics:

• preference languages
• preference semantics
• defeasible logics
• reasoning about preferences
• preference-based planning
• preferences in constraint programming
• preferences in logic programming
• preferences in multi-agent systems
• preference revision and fusion
• preference elicitation
• preference learning
• preference modeling frameworks
• prima facie obligations
• deontic dilemmas
• normative multiagent systems
• formal models of norm change
• merging normative systems
• permissive norms
• epistemic norms
• constitutive norms
• imperatives

For the Subworkshop on Argument, Dialog and Decision, papers are invited on the following topics:

• semantics
• proof theory
• complexity and resource limitations
• applications to epistemic and practical reasoning
• applications to informal theories of argumentation
• comparison with other types of nonmonotonic logic
• the development of argument-based logical systems in formal models of multi-agent reasoning and interaction, such as:
• fact finding investigations
• negotiation
• distributed sense-making
• dispute resolution and mediation
• decision making

Specialized calls have also been issued for the conference’s other Subworkshops, the submission deadline for all of which is 29 January 2010, and which may also be of interest to legal informatics/communication researchers:

• Declarative Programming for NMR
• Action and Belief Change
• Commonsense and NMR for Ontologies
• NMR and Uncertainty

For the main NMR 2010 conference, papers are invited on the following topics:

• foundations of non-monotonic reasoning,
• default reasoning,
• representing actions and planning,
• belief revision and information fusion,
• reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty,
• answer set programming,
• belief updating and inconsistency handling,
• similarity-based reasoning,
• empirical studies of reasoning strategies,
• argument-based non-monotonic logics,
• abductive reasoning, algorithms and implementations,
• non-monotonic logics in multi-agent interaction, including negotiation and dispute resolution,
• non-monotonic reasoning for ontologies,
• declarative programming for non-monotonic reasoning, and
• reasoning with preferences.

For more information, please see the main conference Website.

HT Frederic Koriche.