11,114 research outputs found
Reasoning about Knowledge in Linear Logic: Modalities and Complexity
In a recent paper, Jean-Yves Girard commented that âit has been a long time since philosophy has stopped intereacting with logicâ[17]. Actually, it has no
Offline and online data: on upgrading functional information to knowledge
This paper addresses the problem of upgrading functional information to knowledge. Functional information is defined as syntactically well-formed, meaningful and collectively opaque data. Its use in the formal epistemology of information theories is crucial to solve the debate on the veridical nature of information, and it represents the companion notion to standard strongly semantic information, defined as well-formed, meaningful and true data. The formal framework, on which the definitions are based, uses a contextual version of the verificationist principle of truth in order to connect functional to semantic information, avoiding Gettierization and decoupling from true informational contents. The upgrade operation from functional information uses the machinery of epistemic modalities in order to add data localization and accessibility as its main properties. We show in this way the conceptual worthiness of this notion for issues in contemporary epistemology debates, such as the explanation of knowledge process acquisition from information retrieval systems, and open data repositories
Epistemic Protocols for Distributed Gossiping
Gossip protocols aim at arriving, by means of point-to-point or group
communications, at a situation in which all the agents know each other's
secrets. We consider distributed gossip protocols which are expressed by means
of epistemic logic. We provide an operational semantics of such protocols and
set up an appropriate framework to argue about their correctness. Then we
analyze specific protocols for complete graphs and for directed rings.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2015, arXiv:1606.0729
The Minimal Levels of Abstraction in the History of Modern Computing
From the advent of general-purpose, Turing-complete machines, the relation between operators, programmers, and users with computers can be seen in terms of interconnected informational organisms (inforgs) henceforth analysed with the method of levels of abstraction (LoAs), risen within the Philosophy of Informa- tion (PI). In this paper, the epistemological levellism proposed by L. Floridi in the PI to deal with LoAs will be formalised in constructive terms using category the- ory, so that information itself is treated as structure-preserving functions instead of Cartesian products. The milestones in the history of modern computing are then analysed via constructive levellism to show how the growth of system complexity lead to more and more information hiding
Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems
Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to
unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to
safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as
unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system.
This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about
MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be
backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on
testing and simulation.
We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step
towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of
an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify
both the specification of these systems and the verification of their
properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and
their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and
implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare
effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of
expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin
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