Leendert van der Torre CWI Amsterdam [email protected] 1 The challenge of decision-theoretic deliberation Agent theory proposes to model the behavior of complex software systems in terms of mental attitudes like belief, desires, goals, intentions and obligations, ranging from, e.g., the PRS system [7] to the more recent BOID architecture [3]. Decision-theoretic deliberation captures concepts and rea...

We extend AgentSpeak (L), a belief-desires-intentions architecture, to reason about and plan with contracts between communicating agents. Our architecture is hybrid in the sense that it incorporates both immediate reaction rules and a more complex planning component. We represent contracts as first-class entities to allow the relationships between agents to be specified and developed separately...

This is the last discussion topic in a series of five dealing with ethical, professional, and legal obligations of clinical practice. Junior doctors tend to lack confidence in these subjects, and thus I organised a series of informal discussions in our surgical unit on which these discussion articles are based. The sessions were prepared with reference to nonacademic literature readily availabl...

In this paper, we introduce the internet of things and related architecture and protocols, and the family of usage control (UCON) models, which integrate authorizations (A), obligations (B), and conditions (C). The UCON is a generalization of access control to cover authorizations, obligations, conditions, continuity (ongoing controls), and mutability. In the internet of things’ highly dynamic,...

Obligations of global justice rest mainly on the global rich but also to a lesser extent on the global poor. The governments of poor countries are obliged to fulfill requirements of nonaggression, good governance and decency, along with all other requirements which facilitate the achievement of global justice. So far, obligations of poor countries seem to be taken as given yet the behavior of g...

In a recent paper, Mpofu, Sen Gupta, and Hays (2016) attempt to outline the obligations of recruiting high-income countries (HICs) and would-be emigrant health workers (HWs) to tackle the effects of mass exodus of health workers from underserved regions. They reconstruct (i) Rawlsian and Kantian global justice approaches to argue for moral obligations of HICs and (ii) an individual justice appr...

this paper will compare two of the most prominent mystics of islam and hinduism on what may be called the “end of the mystical journey,” or mokśa in hindu spirituality and fanā in islamic mysticism. the interpretations of these two mystics are naturally developed according to their own epistemological and ontological bases. thus, referring to their most significant principles of thought, the au...