A calculus for epistemic interactions

It plays a central role in intelligent agent systems to model agent's epistemic state and its change. To this end, some formal systems have been presented. Among them, epistemic logics focus on logic laws of different epistemic attributes (e.g., knowledge, belief, common knowledge, etc) and epistemic actions (e.g., public announcement, private announcement, asynchronous announcement, etc). All these systems do not involve the interactive behaviours between an agent and its environment. Through enriching the well-known $\pi$-calculus, this paper presents the e-calculus, which provides a concept framework to model epistemic interactions between agents with epistemic states. Unlike usual process calculus, all systems in the e-calculus are always arranged to run at an epistemic state. To formalize epistemic states abstractly, a group of postulates on them are presented. Moreover, based on these postulates, the behaviour theory of the e-calculus is developed in two different viewpoints.

On graded semantics of abstract argumentation: Extension-based case

Based on Grossi and Modgil's recent work [1], this paper considers some issues on extension-based semantics for abstract argumentation framework (AAF, for short). First, an alternative fundamental lemma is given, which generalizes the corresponding result obtained in [1]. This lemma plays a central role in constructing some special extensions in terms of iterations of the defense function. Applying this lemma, some flaws in [1] are corrected and a number of structural properties of various extension-based semantics are given. Second, the operator so-called reduced meet modulo an ultrafilter is presented. A number of fundamental semantics for AAF, including conflict-free, admissible, complete and stable semantics, are shown to be closed under this operator. Based on this fact, we provide a concise and uniform proof method to establish the universal definability of a family of range related semantics. Thirdly, using model-theoretical tools, we characterize the class of extension-based semantics that is closed under reduced meet modulo any ultrafilter, which brings us a metatheorem concerning the universal definability of range related semantics. Finally, in addition to range related semantics, some graded variants of traditional semantics of AAF are also considered in this paper, e.g., ideal semantics, eager semantics, etc.