Since the beginning of multiagent systems research, it has been argued that theories from the realm of the social sciences can be of help when building multiagent systems, and to some extent vice versa. This study sketches the concepts necessary for agents based on social theories. The concepts, viz. agent, autonomy and norms, used in these theories are discussed and defined. The social theories include theories on decision making, various rationality and action models, and the role and modeling of other agents. The sociological debate on the micro-macro problem is analyzed and translated to multiagent research and combined with philosophical theories on sociality. An agent typology is proposed and linked to the communication and modeling possibilities of the agents. Concluding the thesis is a selection of articles presented at workshops and conferences, focusing on the usefulness of norms for artificial adjustable autonomous agents, and two articles on simulation studies in order to develop and test organization theories.

This chapter introduces modal logic as a tool for talking about graphs, or to use more traditional terminology, as a tool for talking about Kripke models and frames. We want the reader to gain an intuitive appreciation of this perspective, and a firm grasp of the key technical ideas (such as bisimulations) which underly it. We introduce the syntax and semantics of basic modal logic, discuss its expressivity at the level of models, examine its computational properties, and then consider what it can say at the level of frames. We then move beyond the basic modal language, examine the kinds of expressivity offered by a number of richer modal logics, and try to pin down what it is that makes them all ‘modal’. We conclude by discussing an example which brings many of the ideas we discuss into play: games.

this article, we will use examples and puzzles to give some flavor of the field and to demonstrate that the notion "it is known that" is meaningful and interesting for researchers in theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence and game theory

Most work in artificial intelligence and law has concentrated on modelling the type of reasoning done by trial lawyers. In fact, most lawyers' work involves planning -- for example, wills and trusts, real estate deals, and business mergers and acquisitions. Certain planning issues, such as the use of underspecified, or "open-textured" rules, are illustrated especially clearly in this domain. In this thesis, I set forth the characteristic features of planning in law, place it in the context of past artificial intelligence work in both law and planning, and describe CHIRON, a system that I have developed implementing my theory of open-textured planning in the domain of personal income tax law.

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognized to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser, 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by linking them to the development of the child's theory of mind (Wellman, 1990); if correct, this hypothesis might have important implications for the shape of the semantics of modal verbs.

Abstract. We explain the raison d’être and basic ideas of our gametheoretic approach to normative multiagent systems, sketching the central elements with pointers to other publications for detailed developments.

There is a body of commonsense knowledge about human psychology that we all draw upon in everyday life to interpret our own actions, and those of the people around us. In this paper, we define a logic in which this knowledge can be expressed. We focus on a cluster of emotions, including approval, disapproval, guilt, and anger, most of which involve some sort of ethical evaluation of the action that triggers them. As a result, we are able to draw on well-studied concepts from deontic logic, such as obligation, prohibition, and permission. We formalize a portion of commonsense psychology and show how some simple problems can be solved using our logic. In order to handle concrete problems, since emotions do not occur in a vacuum, it is also necessary to formalize some commonsense knowledge about actions and the probable evaluation of those actions. Specifically, we focus on a cluster of actions having to do with ownership and possession of property -- giving, lending, selling, and stealin...

This paper deals with the formal definition of design patterns for group behaviors. The existing studies on distributed object-oriented applications seem to follow two ways. First, people from the analysis and design domain start with some high level algorithmic properties and define some models of distributed behaviors. For instance the design patterns [GHJV95] community follows this approach. Second, people from the operating system and network domains start with some low level primitives and define some observations of distributed runs. The definition of a causality relation [Lam78] for distributed applications belongs to this approach. We show how the design and the observational approaches complement one another and are related for four design patterns. These patterns provide solutions for some standard distributed problems and are defined in the scope of a methodology and a semi-formal proof system for distributed objects applications that we proposed in [Bon94, BDFS96]. Keywords: distributed objects, formal definition of group behaviors, design vs observation viewpoints, design patterns, epistemic logic 1

This section is to thank the people who have helped me on the journey of completing my thesis. I owe my greatest appreciation to all of them. More specifically, I would like to thank my first supervisor Prof. Wiebe van der Hoek and my second supervisor Prof. Michael Wooldridge. Both of them have been extremely helpful and kind to me. I started to work with Wiebe since I was in New Zealand in 2005; later he helped greatly in getting funding for my PhD study. He has been always patient and made time available for me whenever I wanted to discuss research or even personal problems. He does not only give high-level guidance, but also pays attention to the details. I clearly remember we had some lengthy discussions and he went into great depth of the problems with me without complaining that it should be my own work. Such meetings could go beyond the usual working hours. Apart from our professional relationship, Wiebe and his wife Marta also treated me as a real friend. They invited me to their cozy house on several occasions, and also to their wonderful wedding. Mike has been in most of the supervisory meetings for me with Wiebe. I am very impressed by

It is far from clear what is meant by logic or what should be meant by it. It is nevertheless reasonable to identify logic as the study of inferences and inferential relations. The obvious practical use of logic is in any case to help us to reason well, to draw good inferences. And the typical form the theory of any part of logic seems to be a set of rules of inference. This answer already introduces some structure into a discussion of the nature of logic, for in an inference we can distinguish the input called a premise or premises from the output known as the conclusion. The transition from a premise or a number of premises to the conclusion is governed by a rule of inference. If the inference is in accordance with the appropriate rule, it is called valid. Rules of inference are often thought of as the alpha and omega of logic. Conceiving of logic as the study of inference is nevertheless only the first approximation to the title question, in that it prompts more questions than it answers. It is not clear what counts as an inference or what a theory of such inferences might look like. What are the rules of inference based on? Where do we find them? The ultimate end