Norm Change Workshop - Call for Participation

[Jan Broersen]

Workshop on Formal Models of Norm Change
University of Luxembourg
November 29-30, 2007
URL: http://icr.uni.lu/normchange07/

Formal models of norm change have been drawing attention since the
seminal works of Alchourrón and Bulygin on normative systems, and that
of Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson on the logic of theory change. In
order to represent the dynamics of obligations and permissions, several
deontic logics have been proposed. However, these systems did not
explicitly refer to possible changes in the underlying norms - if norms
were mentioned, they were assumed to be invariable.

For the latest developments in areas such as the study of virtual
organizations and communities, distributed environments like electronic
institutions, multiagent systems, and p2p networks, the static view of
norms no longer suffices. In these new applications, norms are
introduced to regulate multi-agent interactions. Depending on which
interactions are deemed desirable for a society, new norms may be
created and old norms may need to be retracted. In this dynamic setting,
it is essential to distinguish norms from obligations and permissions as
studied by deontic logic, to understand the formal properties specific
for the dynamics of norms, and to describe how such objects can be
manipulated (i.e. revised, merged, institutionalized).

Some first steps in this direction have been already made. Examples are
the study of granting permissions or the logic of constitutive norms in
the latest Dagstuhl Seminar on Normative Multiagent Systems (NorMAS07).
Nevertheless, a formal model that captures the relevant features of norm
change is still lacking. A formal model of norm change is expected to
raise new questions about the interaction between the personal desires
and goals of an agent and the norms resulting from the society of agents
it is part of. Game theoretic semantics for the logical relation between
norms and motivations in multiagent systems have been given, but only
for the static case.

This led several researchers to reconsider the issue of norm change.
These researchers come from different areas, such as philosophy,
computer science, formal logic, cognitive science, and economics. The
aim of this workshop is to bring representatives of these communities
together and to promote cross-fertilization of ideas.


PROGRAM:

Thursday, November 29th:
* Opening (John-Jules Meyer)
* Merging Policies (Laurence Cholvy)
* Revision of Norms in Defeasible Logic (Antonino Rotolo)
* Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems that Change: a Framework and Some
Challenges (Luca Tummolini, Emiliano Lorini and Cristiano Castelfranchi)
* TBA (Marek Sergot)
* Revision of Rules in Non-Monotonic Reasoning and Logic Programming
(Alexander Bochman)
* An Input/Output Perspective on Norm Change (Leon van der Torre and
Gabriella Pigozzi)

Friday, November 30th:
* Revision of Rules (Célia da Costa Pereira)
* Revising and Merging of Rules (Souhila Kaci)
* Normative Systems Games, Social Laws or Intention Revision (Thomas
Ågotnes, Wiebe van der Hoek and Mike Wooldridge)
* Preference Update (Fenrong Liu)
* The Logic of Prescriptions: Free Choice Permission and Normative Gaps
(Rosja Mastop)
* A Logic for Social Norms Resulting from Conflicting Group Preferences
(Jan Broersen and Paolo Turrini)

There is no workshop registration fee. However, due to limited space,
participants should register by sending an email to Gabriella Pigozzi
(gabriella.pigozzi at uni.lu).


-- 
   ------- Jan Broersen ------------- Intelligent Systems Group --
   -- www.cs.uu.nl/~broersen/ ---------- Universiteit Utrecht ----
   ---- tel: +31 302533193 ------------ Padualaan 14, De Uithof --
   ---- fax: +31 302513791 --------------- 3584 CH  UTRECHT ------
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