Quantifying Over Public Announcements: Recent Results and Open Questions

7^th February 2023, 13:00 Ashton Lecture Theatre
Dr. Rustam Galimullin
Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen

Abstract

In this talk I will introduce the research area of quantified epistemic actions by presenting logics with quantification over public announcements. Public announcements, being arguably one of the simplest epistemic actions, allow one to express a plethora of communication scenarios: bidding in an auction, revealing ones cards in a parlour game, messaging over an insecure channel, etc. Quantifying over public announcements shifts one’s perspective from particular announcements to existence (or non-existence) of an announcement achieving some epistemic goal. Think of Ali Baba’s cave: even though you may know that there is a phrase opening a cave, you may not know which phrase it is. The talk will be, essentially, a gentle introduction into the area with an overview of the main results and major open problems. Time permitting, I will do some self-promotion by presenting what I have been working on over the past years. I will not assume any familiarity with public announcements, but some general intuitions about modal logics and relational models are desirable.