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Scope:

Modelling intelligent and rational interaction in multi-agent systems has been one of the main issues in Artificial Intelligence that gained momentum in the last decade of the past century. The 'agents' under discussion mainly referred autonomous actors like software programs, robots and even humans. Interaction among them can be cooperative as well as non-cooperative.

This is now merging into broader studies of formal models of society, where computer science meets decision theory, game theory, and social choice theory, for instance in the study of rational deliberation and decision making. One connection which has been made here is 'social software', an interesting perspective, but as yet without a complete theory . We have lots of detailed studies of agents' knowledge, beliefs, preferences, and also of their long-term powers for influencing the outcomes of games. But we do not have a good theory of what may be the most crucial ingredient here: the plans or strategies that information-processing agents have for achieving these goals. In other words, their know-how in addition to their know-that. This is the main topic of this research program.

This project is embedded within the Multi-agent Systems Group at the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering Institute (ALICE) of the University of Groningen. Related efforts on finding logical and computational models for intelligent interaction are being made by several other research groups in the Netherlands, viz. the GLoRiClass project at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), Amsterdam, the Intelligent Systems Group (IS), Utrecht and the Tilburg Institute for Logic and Philosophy and Science (TiLPS).

Objectives:

The investigations of this project will delve into the following topics:

  • Logical theories of strategies, influenced by the epistemic states of the agents in a dynamic setting.

  • Associated programming language to model strategy choices in interaction.

  • Computational models of strategies in multi-agent interaction systems so as to capture the complex ways of human interaction.

  • User-friendly software to model real-life interactive systems.

Funding:

Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)