Posted: 4th April 2011

A workshop on ‘Logic for Interaction’, organised by Samson Abramsky and Nikos Tzevelekos, was held at the Department on the weekend of April 2–3. The workshop gathered participants from the ESF Eurocores LogICCC program ‘Logic for Interaction – LINT’, of which Samson’s own EPSRC project of the same title is a partner.

LINT is a collaborative research project aimed at developing mathematical foundations for interaction. Intelligent interaction involves agents in complex scenarios like conversation, teamwork, or games. Contours of a broad mathematical description are starting to emerge today, based on several individual research developments that now need to be brought together. The project gathers logicians, computer scientists and philosophers from six European countries in an effort to lay the foundations for a unified account of the logic of interaction.

The workshop held in Oxford was attended by researchers from affiliated research groups in Amsterdam, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Paris and Tampere. Local speakers comprised Samson and Nikos, who gave talks on high-level categorical methods for contextuality and non – locality, and on game techniques for reasoning about dynamic resources respectively. Moreover, Boris Motik gave an introductory lecture on description logics, while Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh presented her work on using adjunctions in modal logic to reason about information flow. Other themes covered by talks in the workshop included the very active current work on logics of dependence and independence, with connections to database theory, complexity, generalised quantifiers and linguistics.

Further information: http://sites.google.com/site/oxfordlint/