LogicA: Logic and Applications

The team contributes to several fields of Computer Science, ranging from very theoretical aspects of this science to highly practical applications, thus offering various technological transfers from academy to society.

Theoretical research in LogicA

Nowadays, many of our daily activities which were in the past performed in the ‘real’ world and in interaction with other humans, are carried out in a digital world in interaction with non-human ‘agents’: classic examples are e-commerce, e-voting, e-banking, e-government, etc. . . This transposition of some of our activities into the digital world already plays an important role in our everyday life. This transposition is expected to develop in the future, which is certainly desirable in order to harmonize the rate at which our society evolves. This large picture exhibits an urgent need for both taming already existing e-activities and assisting the birth of new ones.

Existing e-activities, such as e-voting, e-commerce, e-banking, e-government etc. rely on a combination of numerous technologies either at the physical/hardware level or at the digital/software one. The nature of interaction between different services that form the whole application is very complex and leads to critical issues regarding its quality that the research community together with industry try to resolve. Among the main issues, we can mention privacy, legal process, correction of the functionalities. Also, the growing development of applications to support e-activites urges the designers to elaborate methodologies that would allow them to exploit adaptability or re-usability of existing services.

Whichever issue can be picked, rigorous settings are required in order to make evidence of the correctness, the quality, the robustness, etc. of the existing products.

Moreover, some sectors of activity currently suffer from a lack of connection with the digital world: typically, legal processes are very far from being computerized or even computer-assisted, nor are our abilities to remote control some domestic processes such as closing roller blinds when a storm is forecast, and so on. We believe that the afore-mentionned rigorous settings should help in designing new e-activities that support underdeveloped domains currently operated by hand.

The LogicA Project lies in this will to bring out the capabilities to rigorously analyze or design the functionalities of services in e-activities, with a focus on interaction issues from a logical perspective.

The project gathers experts in logic who aim at contributing in the development/improvement of logical theories for multi-agent systems

• to reason about information change
• to master strategic reasoning, with a focus on hierarchical approaches such as those inherent to attack-defense trees (a standard in risk analysis and security)