We introduce a formalism called SLAM (Social Laws on ATL Models) for defining social laws. Such social laws can constrain the behaviour of a multi-agent system. Importantly, these social laws can use any ATL formula as the condition under which an action ...

A universal feature of human societies is the adoption of systems of rules and norms in the service of cooperative ends. How can we build learning agents that do the same, so that they may flexibly cooperate with the human institutions they are embedded ...

Minimality is usually a desired property of social laws. From the perspective of game theory, minimality closely relates to the concept of maximum social welfare and synthesizing a minimal social law can be modeled as an efficient mechanism design ...

This work gives a logical characterization of the (ethical and social) obligations of an agent trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL). An RL agent takes actions by following a utility-maximizing policy. We maintain that the choice of utility function ...

Social interactions are key in multi-agent systems. Social dilemmas have been widely studied to model specific problems in social interactions. However, state-of-the-art social dilemmas have disregarded specific ethical aspects affecting interactions. ...

The research aims at a formal definition of constructive interpretation in law as the dynamic of revision of theories about the normative system, embedding a model of balancing values [13] into an architecture of i/o logics representing conceptual, ...

Personal technology such as electronic partners (e-partners) play an increasing role in our daily lives, and can make an important difference by supporting us in various ways. However, when they offer this support, it is important that they do so with ...

Cybersecurity breaches cause enormous harm to the safety, privacy, and prosperity of individuals and organizations. Many security breaches occur due to people not following security regulations such as applying software patches, updating software ...

The main challenge that artificial intelligence research is facing nowadays is how to guarantee the development of responsible technology. And, in particular, how to guarantee that autonomy is responsible. The social fears on the actions taken by AI can ...

It has become commonplace to assert that autonomous agents will have to be built to follow human rules of behavior--social norms and laws. But human laws and norms are complex and culturally varied systems; in many cases agents will have to learn the ...

Most often, both agents and human societies use norms to coordinate their on-going activities. Nevertheless, choosing the 'right' set of norms to regulate these societies constitutes an open problem. Firstly, intrinsic norm relationships may lead to ...

The paper proposes a logical framework (based on input/output logics) for the representation of legal interpretation. It conceives interpretation by legal scholarship or judicial doctrine as a dynamic of theory change, where rules, values and meaning ...

Normative systems are a widely used framework to coordinate interdependent activities in multi-agent systems. Most research in this area has focused on how to compute normative systems that effectively accomplish a coordination task, as well as ...

Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the norms to choose from may not ...

When rational behavior of the agents and private information are considered, the optimal social law synthesizing problem naturally evolves into a setting which can be handled by the framework of algorithmic mechanism design. We focus on the Bayesian ...

There is an increasing interest on developing virtual enterprises in order to deal with the globalisation of the economy, the rapid growth of information technologies and the increase of competitiveness. In this paper we deal with the development of ...

A key challenge of institutions is how to guide their governing into being desirable. This is important from the perspective of an agent governed by an institution to maintain specific rights, and of cross-institutional policies that require ...

Our focus is on the specification and verification of normative systems that include contrary-to-duty, collective and event-driven imperatives with deadlines. We propose an operational syntax and semantics for the specification of such systems. Using ...

Norms guide multi-agent systems away from being potentially anarchic towards a coordinated and collaborative society. Institutions provide an explicit, external representation of norms as well as the means to detect violations and other conditions. Each ...

Norms have been extensively studied to coordinate multi-agent systems, and the literature has investigated two general approaches to norm synthesis: off-line (synthesising norms at design-time) and on-line (run-time synthesis). On-line synthesis is ...