Submitted Abstract
During my sabbatical, together with colleagues from TU Wien and Zhejiang University, I will work on the project Deontic logic for Artificial Intelligence (DLAI). This project extends my current research area, will lead to new collaborations, and will result in a book on Deontic logic and its applications in AI. The book will address existing areas like normative multi-agent systems and legal informatics, as well as emerging challenges in explainable AI and AI ethics. Deontic logic is the field of logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Typically, a deontic logic uses OA to mean it is obligatory that A, and PA to mean it is permitted that A. Traditionally deontic logic has been developed as a branch of philosophical logic, in particular in formal ethics, and used in linguistics to formalize the normative use of language. It has also widely been used to formalize legal reasoning, and since the early nineties, it has been applied in computer science. On the one hand, I will develop new formalisms to reason about exceptions, conflicts, and legal interpretation in normative systems, and to represent and reason about uncertainty in deontic logic. On the other hand, I will study how to design normative systems in the best possible way, and which kind of tool support can be developed for the design of normative theories. I will use my sabbatical also to reflect on the current state of the art in my research area, and to define a research agenda for the coming years. As such, I am open to new research directions. I will develop new collaborations with researchers at TU Wien, a world leading institution on logic and reasoning for AI, where I will spend eight months of the sabbatical. I will collaborate with several groups in the Institute for Logic and Computation working on knowledge representation and reasoning, including deontic logic and formal argumentation. At the same time, I will further develop the existing collaboration with Zhejiang University, one of the top universities in China, where I am a guest professor since January 2019. The main output of the DLAI project are research articles and a book, but I will also give seminars and lectures and we are planning joint bilateral and European follow-up projects.