Research Interests

My main interests have been in the use of knowledge representation formalisms for specifying, executing and reasoning about multi-agent systems, norm-governed systems, electronic organisations. More precisely, we have been focusing on systems that exhibit the following characteristics:

• The internal architectures of the members are not publicly known. In other words, there is no direct access to an agent's mental state and so we can only infer things about that state.
• Members do not necessarily share a notion of global utility. Agents may fail to, or even choose not to, conform to the specifications of a system in order to achieve their individual goals.
• The behaviour and the interactions of the members cannot be predicted in advance.

Systems of this type may be viewed as instances of normative systems. A characteristic feature of a normative system is that actuality, what is the case, does not always coincide with ideality, what ought to be the case. Therefore, the behaviour of the members of such systems needs to be regulated by a set of laws expressing the agents' permissions, obligations and other more complex normative relations that may exist between them.

We have been developing an executable specification of systems exhibiting the aforementioned characteristics. The specification explicitly represents: (i) the constitutive laws of a system, (ii) the normative environment, and (iii) the physical environment within which the agent interactions take place. Constitutive laws define the meaning of the agents' actions while the normative environment expresses the agents' permissions, obligations, rights, etc. We formalise our executable specification with the use of action languages from the Artificial Intelligence field; we have used the C+ language developed by the Action Group of the University of Texas, and the Event Calculus developed at Imperial College London.