Information processing, rational beliefs and social interaction (10w2133)

The study of the mathematical aspects of belief formation, information processing and rational belief change is of central importance in a number of different fields, namely artificial intelligence, computer science, game theory, logic, philosophy and psychology. The area of belief change studies how a rational agent may maintain its beliefs about a possibly changing environment after obtaining or perceiving new information about the environment. This new information could include properties of the actual world, occurrences of events, and, in the case of multiple agents, actions performed by other agents, as well as the beliefs, preferences or actions (including communication acts) of other agents. Such agents could be acting and sensing in a dynamic world, coalescing information obtained from various sources, negotiating with other agents, or otherwise augmenting and revising their knowledge. The most important question in Game Theory is how to rationally form a belief about other players’ behavior and how to rationally revise those beliefs in light of observed actions. Traditionally Game Theory has relied mostly on probabilistic models of beliefs, although recent research has focused on qualitative aspects of belief change. A new branch of modal logic, called Dynamic Epistemic Logic, has emerged that investigates the effects of events that involve information being revealed to a group of agents in a variety of ways, such as through a public announcement or a private announcement. In artificial intelligence, the relatively recent emergence of the field of cognitive robotics, which is concerned with endowing artificial agents with cognitive functions that involve reasoning about goals, actions, the states of other agents, collaboration and negotiation, etc., has given impetus to the development of computational operators for belief change and the identification of issues arising from concrete, evolving sets of knowledge. Another, related, new field of research, called Social Software, maintains that mathematical models developed to reason about the knowledge and beliefs of a group of agents can be used to deepen our understanding of social interaction and aid in the design of successful social institutions. Social Software is the formal study of social procedures focusing on three aspects: (1) the logical and algorithmic structure of social procedures (the main contributors to this area are computer scientists), (2) knowledge and information (the main contributors to this area are logicians and philosophers) , and (3) incentives (the main contributors are game theorists and economists). The area of belief change is thus of interest to many research communities. To date, there has been limited interaction among these communities. The purpose of this 2-day workshop was to bring together researchers from these