A norm-governed agent takes social norms into account in its practical reasoning. Such norms characterise its role within a specific organisational context. By adopting a role, the agent commits to fulfil and adhere to the social norms associated with that role. These commitments require the agent to act in a way that does not violate any of its prohibitions or obligations. In adopting differen...

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms mainly characterised by constructors to build complex concepts and roles from atomic ones. Expressive role constructors are important in many applications, but can be computationally problematical. We present an algorithm that decides satis ability of the DL ALC extended with transitive and inverse roles, role hierarch...

We examine implemented systems for ethical machine reasoning with a view to identifying the practical challenges (as opposed to philosophical challenges) posed by the area. We identify a need for complex ethical machine reasoning not only to be multi-objective, proactive, and scrutable but that it must draw on heterogeneous evidential reasoning. We also argue that, in many cases, it needs to op...

Autonomous agents operating in a dynamic environment must be able to reason and make decisions about actions in pursuit of their goals. In addition, in a normative environment an agent’s actions are not only directed by the agent’s goals, but also by the norms imposed on the agent. Practical reasoning is reasoning about what to do in a given situation, particularly in the presence of conflicts ...

The day-to-day operations of large-scale enterprises give rise to a wide variety of scheduling problems in such areas as manufacturing, logistics and transportation, and spacecraft operations. Building useful tools for these applications requires a set of capabilities determined both by structural properties of the problems being solved and by teleology specifically, by how schedules are used b...

John Harrison’s Handbook of Practical Logic and Automated Reasoning strongly reminds me of Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming. Both clearly are masterpieces. And both scare me. They are so comprehensive, so erudite, and the information density is so high, that one really has to pay attention to get the most from the exposition. Also, both are a bit idiosyncratic. On the other hand, ...

We describe Scusi?, a spoken language interpretationmechanism designed to be part of a robot-mounted di-alogue system. Scusi?’s interpretation process mapsspoken utterances to text, which in turn is parsed andthen converted to conceptual graphs. In order to sup-port robust and flexible performance of the dialoguemodule, Scusi? maintains multiple options at eachstage ...

ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledgebase and natural-language-processing toolkit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents including topic-jisting (e.g. a news article containing the concepts, “gun,” “convenience store,” “demand money” and “make getaway” might suggest the topics “robbery” and “crime”), affect-sensing (e.g. this email is sa...

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms mainly characterised by constructors to build complex concepts and roles from atomic ones. Expressive role constructors are important in many applications, but can be computationally problematical. We present an algorithm that decides satisfiability of the DL ALC extended with transitive and inverse roles and functiona...

ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledge base and natural-language-processing tool-kit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents including topic-gisting, analogy-making, and other context oriented inferences. The knowledge base is a semantic network presently consisting of over 1.6 million assertions of commonsense knowledge encompassing the s...