Boolean Game with Prioritized Norms

In this paper we study boolean game with prioritized norms. Norms distinguish illegal strategies from legal strategies. Notions like legal strategy and legal Nash equilibrium are introduced. Our formal model is a combination of (weighted) boolean game and so called (prioritized) input/output logic. After formally presenting the model, we use examples to show that non-optimal Nash equilibrium can be avoided by making use of norms.We study various complexity issues related to legal strategy and legal Nash equilibrium

Robust Linear Temporal Logic

Although it is widely accepted that every system should be robust, in the sense that "small" violations of environment assumptions should lead to "small" violations of system guarantees, it is less clear how to make this intuitive notion of robustness mathematically precise. In this paper, we address this problem by developing a robust version of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), which we call robust LTL and denote by rLTL. Formulas in rLTL are syntactically identical to LTL formulas but are endowed with a many-valued semantics that encodes robustness. In particular, the semantics of the rLTL formula $\varphi \Rightarrow \psi$ is such that a "small" violation of the environment assumption $\varphi$ is guaranteed to only produce a "small" violation of the system guarantee $\psi$. In addition to introducing rLTL, we study the verification and synthesis problems for this logic: similarly to LTL, we show that both problems are decidable, that the verification problem can be solved in time exponential in the number of subformulas of the rLTL formula at hand, and that the synthesis problem can be solved in doubly exponential time

Requirements Prioritization Based on Benefit and Cost Prediction: An Agenda for Future Research

In early phases of the software cycle, requirements prioritization necessarily relies on the specified requirements and on predictions of benefit and cost of individual requirements. This paper presents results of a systematic review of literature, which investigates how existing methods approach the problem of requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost. From this review, it derives a set of under-researched issues which warrant future efforts and sketches an agenda for future research in this area

Four types of diaspora mobilization : Albanian diaspora activism for Kosovo independence in the US and the UK

This comparative study explores the conditions and causal pathways through which conflict-generated diasporas become moderate or radical actors when linked to homelands experiencing limited sovereignty. Situated at the nexus of scholarship on diasporas and conflict, ethnic lobbying in foreign policy, and transnationalism this article develops four types of diaspora political mobilization—radical (strong and weak) and moderate (strong and weak)—and unpacks the causal pathways that lead to these four types in different political contexts. I argue that dynamics in the original homeland drive the overall trend towards radicalism or moderation of diaspora mobilization in a host-land: high levels of violence are associated with radicalism, and low levels with moderation. Nevertheless, how diaspora mobilization takes place is a result of the conjuncture of the level of violence with another variable, the linkages of the main secessionist elites to the diaspora. The article uses observations from eight cases of Albanian diaspora mobilization in the US and the UK from 1989 until the proclamation of Kosovo's independence in 2008

Judging Actions on the Basis of Prima Facie Duties. The case of self-driving cars

The need for a logic that allows us to reason about conflicting and non-conflicting norms has recently emerged in the domain of self-driving cars. In this paper we propose a formal model that supports moral decisions making by autonomous agents such as for example autonomous vehicles. Such a model – which we call a “Deontic Machine” – helps resolve both typical and atypical moral and legal situations that agents may encounter. The Deontic Machine has two sources of inspiration. The first one is W.D. Ross’s theory of prima facie norms and the other one is a deontic multi-valued logic. The main contribution of this paper is bringing together conceptual and technical tools of deontic logic to show how they can be used to control or assess the behaviour of a self-driving car

Introduction: Infrastructures of African American Print

"The essays in this volume attend to both of these possible relations to the infrastructures of inscription. They explore not only how white supremacist histories and infrastructures have limited and foreclosed black expression but also how black expression has extended, recoded, and transformed some of these very structures, affording new possibilities.

Reinforce-lib: A Reinforcement Learning Library for Scientific Research

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has already achieved several breakthroughs on complex, high-dimensional, and even multi-agent tasks, gaining increasingly interest from not only the research community. Although very powerful in principle, its applicability is still limited to solving games and control problems, leaving plenty opportunities to apply and develop RL algorithms for (but not limited to) scientific domains like physics, and biology. Apart from the domain of interest, the applicability of RL is also limited by numerous difficulties encountered while training agents, like training instabilities and sensitivity to hyperparameters. For such reasons, we propose a modern, modular, simple and understandable Python RL library called reinforce-lib. Our main aim is to enable newcomers, practitioners, and researchers to easily employ RL to solve new scientific problems. Our library is available at https://github.com/Luca96/reinforce-lib

To Heck With Ethics: Thinking About Public Issues With a Framework for CS Students

This paper proposes that the ethics class in the CS curriculum incorporate the Lawrence Lessig model of regulation as an analytical tool for social issues. Lessig’s use of the notion of architecture, the rules and boundaries of the sometimes artificial world within which social issues play out, is particularly resonant with computing professionals. The CS curriculum guidelines include only ethical frameworks as the tool for our students to engage with societal issues. The regulation framework shows how the market, law, social norms, and architecture can all be applied toward understanding social issues