Wiebe van der Hoek - Böcker

Contemporary epistemological and cognitive studies, as well as recent trends in computer science and game theory have revealed an increasingly important and intimate relationship between Information, Interaction, and Agency.Agents perform actions based on the available information and in the presence of other interacting agents. From this perspective Information, Interaction, and Agency neatly ties together classical themes like rationality, decision-making and belief revision with games, strategies and learning in a multi-agent setting.Unified by the central notions Information, Interaction, and Agency, the essays in this volume provide refreshing methodological perspectives on belief revision, dynamic epistemic logic, von Neumann games, and evolutionary game theory; all of which in turn are central approaches to understanding our own rationality and that of other agents.

This book collects all the papers that appeared in 2005 in Kno- edge, Rationality and Action (KRA), a journal published as a s- cial section of Synthese, which addresses contemporary issues in epistemic logic, belief revision, game and decision theory, rational agency, planning and theories of action. As such, the special section appeals to researchers from Computer Science, Game Theory, Ar- ?cial Intelligence, Philosophy, Knowledge Representation, Logic and Agents, addressing issues in arti?cial systems that have to gather information, reason about it and then make a sensible decision about what to do next. It will be clear already from the contents pages, that this book indeed re?ects the core of KRA: the papers in this volume address degrees of belief or certainty, and rational agency. The latter has several manifestations: often constraints on the agent’s belief, behaviour or decision making. Moreover, this book shows that KRA indeed represents a ‘loop’ in the behaviour of the agent: after having made a decision, the life of the agent does not end, rather, it will do some sensing or collect otherwise the outcome of its decision, to update its beliefs or knowledge accordingly and make up its mind about the next decision task.

Dynamic Epistemic Logic is the logic of knowledge change. This is not about one logical system, but about a whole family of logics that allows us to specify static and dynamic aspects of multi-agent systems. This book provides various logics to support such formal specifications, including proof systems. Concrete examples and epistemic puzzles enliven the exposition. The book also contains exercises including answers and is eminently suitable for graduate courses in logic.A sweeping chapter-wise outline of the content of this book is the following. The chapter 'Introduction' informs the reader about the history of the subject, and its relation to other disciplines. 'Epistemic Logic' is an overview of multi-agent epistemic logic - the logic of knowledge - including modal operators for groups, such as general and common knowledge. 'Belief Revision' is an overview on how to model belief revision, both in the 'traditional' way and in a dynamic epistemic setting. 'Public Announcements' is a detailed and comprehensive introduction to the logic of knowledge to which dynamic operators for truthful public announcement are added. Many interesting applications are also presented in this chapter: a form of cryptography for ideal agents also known as 'the Russian cards problem', the sum-and-product riddle, etc. 'Epistemic Actions' introduces a generalization of public announcement logic to more complex epistemic actions. A different perspective on that matter is independently presented in 'Action Models'. 'Completeness' gives details on the completeness proof for the logics introduced in 'Epistemic Logic', 'Public Announcements', and 'Action Models'. 'Expressivity' discusses various results on the expressive power of the logics presented.

Dynamic Epistemic Logic is the logic of knowledge change. 'Epistemic Logic' is an overview of multi-agent epistemic logic - the logic of knowledge - including modal operators for groups, such as general and common knowledge. 'Epistemic Actions' introduces a generalization of public announcement logic to more complex epistemic actions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence, JELIA 2006. The 34 revised full papers and 12 revised tool description papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. The papers cover a range of topics within the remit of the Conference, such as logic programming, description logics, non-monotonic reasoning, agent theories, automated reasoning, and machine learning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 33rd Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, SOFSEM 2007, held in Harrachov, Czech Republic in January 2007. The 69 revised full papers, presented together with 11 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 283 submissions. The papers were organized in four topical tracks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th German Conference on Multiagent Systems Technologies, MATES 2009, held in Hamburg, Germany in September 2009 - colocated with the 10th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA X) and the 5th International Workshop on Modelling of Objects, Components, and Agents (MOCA 2009). The 14 revised full papers, 10 short papers, and 5 exhibition papers presented together with one invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The papers present and discuss the latest advances of research and development in the area of autonomous agents and multiagent systems ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to applications in various fields.

This volume is conceived as a rami?cation of the eighth conference on Logic and the Foundations of the Theory of Games and Decisions (LOFT8), which took placein Amsterdam,inJuly2008.Inall,61papersweresubmitted to thisevent, of which 48 were presented. This volume is based on a selection of the presented papers and the invited talks: they survived a thorough and lengthy reviewing process. The LOFT conferences have been a regular biannual event since 1994. The ?rstconference washosted by the Centre Internationalde RecherchesMathe- tiques in Marseille (France),the next four took place at the InternationalCentre for Economic Research in Turin (Italy), the sixth conference was hosted by the Graduate School of Management in Leipzig (Germany), the seventh took place at the University of Liverpool (UK) and LOFT8 was organized at the ILLC in 1 Amsterdam. The LOFT conferences are interdisciplinary events that bring together - searchers from a variety of ?elds: computer science, economics, game theory, linguistics, logic, multi-agent systems, psychology, philosophy, social choice and statistics. Its focus is on the general issue of rationality and agency.In the last decade, there has been a ?oroushing activity in exactly the kind of areas that LOFT aims to address, which is demonstrated by not only the number of s- missions to LOFT8, but also the fact that the conference is becoming more and more a home for a large group of researchers, rather than a host for passersby from di?erent disciplines.

FoLLI-LNCS is the publication platform for the Association of Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI, www.folli.org).